I have been using Perl for a long time, it did not get everything right when it first rolled out its object system. Through incremental improvements and backward compatibility the language has become very stable. Go is just getting to 1.5, so I expect it to have some issues at the beginning.
That $DOLLAR fix isn't just some "issue" at the beginning as though it was a design mistake or architectural oversight. It is flat out sloppy work.
If you are creating a programming language that wants to maintain backwards compatibility surely every check in you make would be as close to perfect. No ?
Perl has been around since 1987. I would expect Go (first released in 2009) to have learned valuable lessons from earlier failures. This particular set of features doesn't appear to be very thoughtful.
