I'm a 90's C programmer and a Golang programmer now, and while there's some truth to this, it's reductive. A 2000s-era C programmer would not write socket code that worked the way net.Conn does. While C code gave us the "pipes and filters" abstraction of Unix, they are not an idiom in C code --- in fact, Golang's reader/writer interfaces feel more like a refinement of Java than a modernization of C.
Golang feels very much like an offspring of Java and Python to me.
Yes, Go has a heavy focus on interfaces and structural subtyping, as I said. It reflects the trend behind Pike's languages: C-like + some form of CSP + key abstraction.
But, even the net package has a noticeable Plan 9 legacy, like the use of dial/listen, as opposed to the clumsy Berkeley socket way. You might recall this was a central complaint of Pike's in his famous presentation "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant".
Obviously it's nowhere near as pure as ndb, but that's the reality of being in Unix.
That captures it for me, imagine a Python that squeezed to the essential bits of Java and left you with Go. It helped that Java, Python, and C++ were the core languages at Google where Go was developed so you had to have something that could bring that community along.
For me personally Rust is more my style, but I agree with the original author that the structural aspects of Go program construction will benefit large communities greatly. It is something I had not really considered seriously before.
> Golang feels very much like an offspring of Java and Python to me.
To me when people compare Go to Python, I can't help feeling that means quite an old version of Python (eg 1.5) in terms of expressivity and higher level features.
Python 1.5 was quite a small straight forward language compared to today. Which seems like the goals Go has.
When I looked it over it struck me as a stripped down Java that's friendlier for systems programming and could interoperate with C without the torture of JNI.
Golang feels very much like an offspring of Java and Python to me.