> Complicating parsers, the grammar, readability

Operator overloading has absolutely no effect on the parser or grammar.

It may harm readability but that's more a question of naming. An operator is just a name. If you use that name to refer to something unexpected, you'll harm readability. If you use it for something intuitive, you'll improve it.

I don't disagree with you. I'm not suggesting that Go designers made the wrong decision with the goals they had. I am jealous that it's less useful to me though.

forgive my ignorance, why is operator overloading particularly useful in scientific computing?

Because it lets your math code look more like math and less like code.

    v := Vector{}
    v2 := Vector{}

to add the two vectors, currently you have to do something like

    result := v.Add(v2)

rather than the nicer

    result := v + v2

In the small scale, it doesn't seem like a big deal. In a large and complicated scientific program, it can make the code a lot harder to read.

Note: I think it is good that Go does not have operator overloading, though I think it's a shame that means it's not as good for scientific & math programming.

So your code can still look like math when the operands are complex types.