The first Go program was a LISP S-expression parser:
http://blog.golang.org/first-go-program
Stephen Wolfram writes about the birth of Mathematica: "Macsyma was written in LISP, and lots of people said LISP was the only possibility. But a young physics graduate student named Rob Pike convinced me that C was the “language of the future”, and the right choice." http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/06/06/there-was-a-time-before-m...
Go was written at Google to solve very specific problems Google had. Looming large was the need for a C family language that implemented concurrency, fast compiles, and so on. The C family requirement is quite simple: most google engineers are young and don't know functional programming, have experience with Google's existing C/C++ code base, and they will be using Go to replace and extend existing systems already in C/C++. A new functional paradigm, nice as it is, would just get in their way. I'm not enamored by many features of the language, but I'm really hard pressed to say that those features do not solve Google's problems.