Something I'd like to know is what languages they've used in the past few years. When Pike answered the question, he mentioned a bunch of dead research languages. He said that Ken Thompson was influenced by B, but I highly doubt that he's written any B code in the past 30 years.

Go's overarching principle is "to reduce the amount of typing" and "reduce clutter and complexity", but if you switch from something like python or ruby to go, you'll quickly notice there's a lot more typing and complexity for programs. Especially when it comes to stuff like type declarations and error handling.