I didn't say Go bans exceptions because of safety. I said the people it was targeted for won't miss them because they have been working for years in environments where they are not allowed for safety reasons, and the stated justifications for not having them are weak.
The arguments about assertions is a typical example of this weakness. A failed assertion in any reasonable runtime and even in google3 C++ produces a stack trace and a log message indicating what assertion failed. It's then usually easy to go read the code where the problem was hit and start debugging.
In contrast, I find typical Go code to be an unreadable mess of nested if statements and C-style return code propagation. Information is routinely lost and errors ignored. When something goes wrong you don't get a convenient stack trace showing exactly how the program arrived at the place where the failure occurred, you might if you are lucky get a generic error message indicating the general subsystem where something went wrong, or if you're very lucky a log message, but several big Go programs I've seen didn't bother with exhaustive logging on error paths and were difficult to debug as a result.
Compare to other languages (nearly all of them) which have exceptions: I've never once been confused or found code hard to read because of the use of them. That's just not a problem I recognise. But I've benefited from them more times than I can count.
I didn't know Odersky said that. I think that's very polite. Regardless, the language he designed looks nothing like Go, so I guess if he really likes Go's design decisions he has decided that his own language got it all wrong. I don't think he's really decided that.