Coming from an occam/transputer background (in the 1980s) I felt goroutines were too low level. Luckily its trivial to add a PAR-like construct via sync.WaitGroup (e.g. github.com/atrn/par). That said Go's channels are far easier to work with - buffering and multi-producer/-consumers being very common needs which, in occam, you implement yourself. The lack of guards in Go's ALT (select) is a shame and the nil channel hack is just that, a hack.