if you want to invoke the America vs Europe rift you'll probably be interested in an earlier talk from the same conference given by Robert Griesemer on the evolution of Go:

https://sourcegraph.com/blog/live/gophercon2015/123645585015

in short, Go's design is not from a unique line of programming languages, it just goes back further than you think. the argument made in the talk is that Go combines the European heritage of Algol (Pascal/Oberon) with the American one (C).