Great points, esp on Go vs real competition. It's why I'm against their modernized ALGOL68. Languages such as Haskell, Clojure, Rust, Julia, Scala, Ocaml, and others are at least trying to apply lessons learned in programming research to improve things for programmers. Google would've been better off taking one of the more native ones, identifying its worst issues, using their geniuses to fix those, and then building tools + community on that.

Instead, we get an alternative to unsafe, native and safe, scripting languages without most advantages of the best of either. I might still try it out if I do a comparative evaluation of modern work. By that time, it might have gotten better.