At last! I'm not insane! I raised this on the golang dev forums and got nowhere: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/r4rdPdsH1Fg/yjOOz... The response was basically "we disagree" and I wandered away feeling confused that so many bright people couldn't see the problem here.
> The response was basically "we disagree" and I wandered away feeling confused that so many bright people couldn't see the problem here. That's a rather disingenuous summary given that literally the very first response is Brad Fitzpatrick from the Go team agreeing with you, acknowledging that it's unfortunate, and admitting that it can't feasibly be changed yet due to the compatibility guarantees. And then shortly a…
EDIT: For the downvoters, quoting Rob Pike in one of his presentations, "Go's design is done".