Think about who is picking up which language and how many programmers with what background there are. Go offers solutions for certain problems that many of programmers have. I.e. performance and ease of deployment are the biggest ones for people coming from scripting languages, and there are a lot of them. Having easy to pick up syntax doesn't hurt easier. But generics are not as valuable for them at the beginning. And Go's syntax has like a dozen of critical problems either way, might as well add generics in 2.0 together with all the fixes.