Heh I think you inadvertently proved my point. I spent 6 months with Scheme, working through half of the SICP for personal growth. Just because the specification is simple it doesn't mean the patterns and lessons are straightforward, and I'm a pretty slow learner. If you read the Go FAQ you will note that about 1/3 of it is along the lines of "Why doesn't Go...". When I see that sort of language it's clear that between the lines there's a lot to learn, and the only way for me to learn a language is to write code.
But after all of this I think I'm going to have to write one of my site-specific crawlers in Go for fun; since Go has a STOMP binding it should be easy to integrate into my existing architecture. Where things will get interesting is finding a compatible serialization library (and so we start getting into the real world problems of using a new language to solve interesting problems... hopefully one of the .NET protocol buffer implementations will work correctly with the one I imagine exists for Go).
But after all of this I think I'm going to have to write one of my site-specific crawlers in Go for fun; since Go has a STOMP binding it should be easy to integrate into my existing architecture. Where things will get interesting is finding a compatible serialization library (and so we start getting into the real world problems of using a new language to solve interesting problems... hopefully one of the .NET protocol buffer implementations will work correctly with the one I imagine exists for Go).