This month, Go turns three, and this is the video that started it all for me.

As a testiment to skills of Pike, Thompson and Griesemer, the ideals presented in 2009 have survived virtually unaltered into the Go 1.0 release earlier this year. Rewatching this video recently I was reminded that when changes were required they were almost always to the standard library, which underwent constant revision (aided by the gofix tool) until the 1.0 code freeze. From my notes, the important language level changes were

• By early 2010, semicolons had been removed from the written syntax (although still present implicitly inside the compiler).
• The semantics of non-blocking send and recieve and channel closure were explored and altered a number of times before arriving at their final form.
• Maps dropped the confusing map[key] = nil, false deletion form, replaced with more regular delete(map, key), although some bemoaned the addition of another language builtin.
• The constant literal syntax has been improved to make it clearer when constructing large constant literal forms.
• Lastly, the builtin error type replaced the original os.Error interface type.