I'd be interested in such a study as well, though I predict an opposite result. There is no evidence God does not exist, just as there is no evidence he does exist; therefore, atheism requires just as much faith as any other religion.

Whoops. Should have read the next sentence on the front page of julialang.org:

The core Julia implementation uses the MIT License, not the GPL. See the license information here.

Nice to see the police didn't turn a blind eye to a citizen in need.

So the issue of canonical brace style and automatic semi-colon insertion kind of go hand in hand. If you know you're going to have a canonical brace style, then choose the one that allows you to simplify the rules of the automatic semi-colon insertion and allows easy line-at-a-time parsing for interactive implementations.

I suppose I can respect that you don't think it's a problem worth solving. But I think that if you're going through all the trouble of designing a new language, you might as well fix as many problems as you can, no matter how small. Certainly compound declarations with function pointers are complex, but I think the ability to read the declaration from left to right is a major improvement over the Clockwise-Spiral Rule of C.

Perhaps this section of the FAQ might be useful in explaining some of those changes. Another page explaining the declaration syntax in particular can be found here.

Every person who ever reads your code disagrees. Programming is not a solitary activity.

How does having a canonical brace format in any way limit what you are able to do with the language?

As mentioned below, in the Go community there isn't much discussion of formatting. If you prefer a technical reason, then the canon format can be easily enforced using the "go fmt" command. Using a separate brace style means you must either manually enforce it, or fork gofmt and make the changes yourself. In the end, is it really worth the extra effort?

One thing I'd like to add that most people miss is that the language was designed for easy dependency management, and it's built into the go tool. For instance, if you download library A that depends on library B that you don't have installed, when you build library A the tools will download, install, and build library B automatically.

Um... what problems are caused by the automatic semi-colon insertion?

Don't forget vitess, which is a Google project aimed at making MySQL databases scale better, and is used in YouTube. The Thanksgiving Google Doodle was also written in Go, and developed in 24 hours. Google does eat their own dogfood.

Imagine you're watching a really good movie and your parents tell you to switch it off halfway through. Wouldn't you be angry? That has nothing to do with addiction.

Of course, the real problem with this statement is video games are much longer than movies. Zelda games can last 50 hours or more, depending on completion and whether you've played the game before or not. It's certainly not healthy to play games like that in a single sitting (this coming from a guy who played Mass Effect 2 in a single 24-hour session).

But the problem is not that you take away their super powers or anything like that, it's a bit more basic: They just want to know how the story ends! With games like Wii Sports and Mario Kart, the "stories" only last a few minutes, at which point it's easy to break away from the game.

Of course, game developers aren't stupid. Most games of the length of Zelda and Final Fantasy aren't written such that they have to be played in one sitting. The real trick, of course, is that you, as a parent, have to be able to find points in the story to switch off the game. This is not something you can do unless you are very familiar with the game itself, so my suggestion is this: Watch your child play the games. You don't have to watch every second; if you have a laptop you could get some work done during battles and puzzles and stuff like that. The point is to follow the story and find the best point to say "okay, that's enough for today" rather than just limiting it to half an hour a day.

One of Go's advantages are the features deliberately left out of the language, such as the typical class hierarchy, multiple inheritance, and operator overloading. Similar to conditional compilation in C, those features, while useful, are too easy to abuse and make code harder to read in the long run. So the Go devs left them out. You can't do something like that and keep backwards compatibility.

If backwards compatibility was necessary for a successful language, then every new language would C++.

K = 1/2 * m * v^2 (kinetic energy; integral of momentum with respect to velocity)

x = 1/2 * a * t^2 (position from acceleration; integral of velocity w.r.t. time)

U = 1/2 * k * x^2 (potential energy of a spring; integral of force w.r.t. distance)

E = 1/2 * C * V^2 (energy stored in a capacitor; integral of charge w.r.t. voltage)

E = 1/2 * L * I^2 (energy stored in an inductor; integral of voltage w.r.t. current)

A = 1/2 * tau* r^2 (area of a circle, integral of circumference w.r.t. radius)

Changing the formula actually brings it into line with the others. This is explained in both the "Pi is Wrong!" article and the Tau Manifesto.

As for spheres, remember that the volume of a sphere is 2/3 of that of a circumscribed cylinder. The volume of said cylinder is 1/2 * tau * r^2 * 2 * r = tau * r^3. The tau formula clearly shows this relationship, while the pi formula obfuscates it.

Almost all of it. The entire purpose of typesetting systems such as (La)TeX is to make it so the users didn't have to worry about such things.