The bar for what counts as "innovation" in mainstream languages is strikingly low.

All of which are available in other languages...

In addition to the fact that none of it's features are particularly novel lets remember that Go's founding ambition was "compile faster than C++"

And people disparage them for it, which is nuts. Google had a problem that they determined could best be solved by creating Go. So they did it, and presumably, they've solved their problem. That seems like a perfectly good use of incremental improvement.

Which raises an interesting point: what to people on the outside looks like a paradoxical combination of insane hubris and deep technical conservatism is probably simply what to Google's eyes looks like steady-state, responsible technical problem-solving -- c.f., hhvm and Facebook for a similar approach.

> Go's founding ambition was "compile faster than C++"

And Kotlin's is "compile faster than Scala"!