One of my biggest problems with Go is that what the authors say it is for and what people using it for are 2 different things. The authors say it is to replace systems languages, and as far as I know they've never retracted that position, whereas in the wild it's being used instead of Python and other similar scripting languages.
I think that's simply a misunderstanding of what "systems language" means. It does not mean "go write an operating system", even though that's an application that comes to mind because of C.
From the top of golang.org: "Go is an open source programming environment that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software." That's a pretty general statement. Follow on with this one from [1]: "Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language." They're pretty clear that they want to have their cake and eat it too, regarding the benefits of these language classes.
For more color on Go's origins, focus, and design, I highly recommend the "Go at Google" talk by Rob Pike, available as video [2] or an edited article version [3].
It's not a misunderstanding at all. From day one the target was C/C++. The initial demos were all about how fast Go compiles compared to C++.
Hell, that FAQ makes it pretty clear what the target is. Please read "What is the purpose of the project?" and tell me how the target is anything but C/C++...
