Go is mind-stretching in its practicality and pragmatism.
Most (but not all) its ideas have been implemented before elsewhere (but then, that is almost bound to be true of any new language).
But the real 'innovation' is in the careful selection of those ideas and in how well they work together _in practice_.
This puts off people who are used to this or that feature in other languages, Go is not about checklists of features or abstract arguments about how languages should be, it is about what works really well when you sit down to write (or read) code.
Most (but not all) its ideas have been implemented before elsewhere (but then, that is almost bound to be true of any new language).
But the real 'innovation' is in the careful selection of those ideas and in how well they work together _in practice_.
This puts off people who are used to this or that feature in other languages, Go is not about checklists of features or abstract arguments about how languages should be, it is about what works really well when you sit down to write (or read) code.