I have mixed feelings about this. In one sense, it's actually pretty true that no new language has really been developed with compilation speed as its primary focus for ages. So in that sense I applaud Go for its dedication to that purpose. On the other hand, a language devoted largely to compile speed (and that's really the one unifying principle I've seen in Go's feature set, since I view "simplicity" as essentially arbitrary in a formal sense) might be a cool research language, but I wish Go did make a few concessions for the sake of productivity. There are some really fast ahead-of-time compiling variants of ML, like Poly/ML, and in the spirit of pragmatism I think Go could have settled for "fast enough" compilation instead and used well-known techniques like type erasure to basically get 'interface{} but with static checking' generics.