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I think you're giving far too much weight to that off the cuff quote from one of the creators of Go.

Really I think it's more useful to view it as a better C in the less is more tradition, compared to say C++ and Java, which at the time were pretty horrible. That's my understanding of its origin. It makes sense in that context; it doesn't have pretensions to be a super advanced state of the art language, but more of a workhorse, which as Pike pointed out here could be useful for onboarding junior programmers.

Certain things about it I think have proven really quite useful and I wish other languages would adopt them:

* It's easy to read precisely because the base language is so boring * Programs almost never break on upgrade - this is wonderful * Fewer dependencies, not more * Formatters for code

Lots of little things (struct tags for example) I'm not so keen on but I think it's pretty successful in meeting its rather modest goals.

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> Really I think it's more useful to view it as a better C

But Go is nothing at all like C, and it's completely unsuitable for most of the situations where C is used. I'm having trouble even imagining what you're getting at with this comparison. The largest areas of overlap I can think of are "vaguely similar syntax style" and "equally bad and outdated type system". Pretty much everything else of substance is different. Go is GC'd, Go has a runtime, etc.

Clearly you see it differently from people who use go, have a nice day.

I mean, if you have a coherent explanation for why you made that comparison, it should be pretty easy to communicate...

Your response as it stands is not doing much to fight the "Go enthusiasts are Blub Paradox victims" perception

No, the vast majority of people who use go are using it in situations where Java or Python would have been appropriate, not C.

> people who use go are using it in situations where [...] Python would have been appropriate

I'm not so sure about that. Python is a DSL for connecting C functions together. Whereas the biggest criticism of Go (gc, at least, but fair to say it has become synonymous with Go) is around its poor C-interop.

In fact, because of that limitation, Go has developed a bit of a "rewrite those C functions in Go" attitude. While that doesn't indicate that Go is a better C (that's subjective anyway), it does indicate that they are found on the same playground. You're probably not going to rewrite Linux in Go, which might be what you are grasping at, but that's not where C ends. Not even close.

You may have a point about Java. Griesemer was a founding member, after all.

To say a better C means it is clearly influenced by C, not that it was intended to replace C in all contexts, but that it's a compiled language in the C tradition which extends C idioms/syntax, adds a good standard library, better strings etc without losing the simplicity which made C attractive.

Just as C++ intended to improve C but went in a very different direction and added a lot more. Crucially, it doesn't add inheritance as C++/Java did, which I think is an interesting choice which I find quite pleasing and avoids a lot of horrible architectural decisions and vast inheritance trees.

There are certainly lots of bits I would change having used it a while, but I find it quite useful to work in and far more like C than say Java, Ruby or Python which it has supplanted more than usage of actual C. Not sure one of the goals was to supplant C usage and that was not at all what I meant to imply.

> To say a better C means it is clearly influenced by C

Influenced by the same person who influenced C, at least, but it is nearly a straight up clone of Newsqueak, with a dash of Oberon, combined with a will to be more Zen than Python.

If you follow the bouncing ball of influence through Newsqueak, Limbo, et al. I'm sure you make it to C. But then why stop there? What about B, BCPL, etc.?

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