"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."
I personally think hubris led to Pike not working with others in the industry and Go bears the stamps of some very unfortunate idiosyncratic decisions as a result. The error handling in particular is awful. Refusal to admit parameterized types (until forced to, later) another.
I like to imagine an alternate reality where Google and Mozilla had birthed something together halfway between Go and Rust. I think the world really still needs something like this for server development; parametrized types, ML-influenced type system, proper strictly typed error handling and pattern machine like Rust / ML; native code production like both; but with GC and fast compilation and a good powerful standard library like Go.
Closest to this out there might be OCaml, I dunno. Maybe Swift.
You might like https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01841v4
Go's debut was in 2009 (1.0 a few years later, but you could have used it not long after its announcement at the end of 2009). Rust's first public release was in 2012. It's very unlikely that early, pre-public release Rust could have had any significant real or hypothetical influence on Go.