npe

I'd argue that Go is explicitly sociological. Most of the novel ideas in Go (process calculi/guarded commands in a concurrent language) were originally embedded in Cardelli and Pike's Squeak back in the 80s. The rest is trying to standardize the way scalable web applications are built.

The minute you put language constructs in the base syntax and runtime of the language, it's a lot more than friction. Love it or hate it, Go is inextricably tied to CSP.

It matters a lot IMO. Most systems programming languages can implement whatever concurrency primitives you care to use, but most people default to whatever is provided by the OS/language because concurrency is hard. Having first-class syntactic sugar over a concurrent runtime bakes in a certain programming style in the language, which strongly determines how the language is used and the programming style. Go comes out of the Newsqueak/Aleph/Limbo family which has a very different style of programming compared to a lot of other languages.

As I understand it, he's talking about select/alt (i.e. guarded commands from CSP) being a native feature of the language rather than callback-based approaches. It's possible to implement CSP channels in most languages, but they're not first-class like go.