We have years. They're passing whether we like it or not. In the meantime you can choose whichever implementation of the Unix tools that you want. In the future there may be more options that fit the bill, developed in a safe language without the kinds of buffer overflows and things that exist in C tools today.

Yeah, just because Joel said so doesn't mean it's true.

I've been responsible for a bunch of rewrites that were resounding successes and typically reduced the bug load (subtle or not) by orders of magnitude.

What's wrong with doing this for fun's sake or educational value (both for the authors or people who want to study Go)?

If it turns out to be more widely used, at least it's safer than C code.