Python's approach has always been highly pragmatic. Go's is as well, but with somewhat different goals. The Go team's goal seems to involve putting together a clean-enough syntax with fast-enough for systems programming performance combined with powerful-enough high-level concurrency model. They don't want to win the gold in any one category. They're going for the decathalon!

In any case, language syntax should always take into account the expectation of programmer communities. If you push syntax too far, you lose too many people.