please, enlighten me :)

For better or worse, Go's design is anything but modern.

It lacks things such as immutability and generics. It also perpetuates the mistake of including a run-time type error, null (nil).

More precisely, Go has generics (along with overloading), they are just not available to users of the language.

Note that modern does not mean perfect. I'm not sure you answer could not fall into the "this-language-lacks-my-favorite-cool-fancy-feature-so-it-is-necessarily-an-old-fashioned-crappy-piece-of-s*" syndrome?

Were they actually fancy or cool, maybe. They're rather basic features among statically typed languages.

Also, I'm not trying to say Go is bad or that I dislike it. It's simply not a modern language as far as design goes.

That it might have deserved the moniker if it had been released around the same time as java.

Make that a few decades before actually:

http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/

Well it does have a structural type system (one of the few other languages with one being OCaml, '96), a GC (popularised/made acceptable by Java '95) and provides language-level support for CSP (Occam '83)

Thanks for the link, that was very interesting to read! I didn't know Algol (I knew the name and how "historical" it is but not the details).

Hadn't seen this before. This is brilliant. Thanks.

So, who's up for an Algol-15 project?