Go is generally a minimal language as far as both language keywords and features go. It's not quite down to Scheme level minimalism , it's far more pragmatic than that, but it does try to be small. In among this smallness, one thing may stand out; I'm thinking of the increment and decrement statements , ' i++ ' and ' j-- '.

There's strictly speaking no need for these to exist. Since Go makes them statements instead of operators, they are exactly equivalent to ' i += 1 ' and ' j -= 1 '. Yet not only do they exist, but if you run golint over code that contains the assignment versions it will suggest simplifying them to increment and decrement:

fred.go:4:2: should replace i += 1 with i++

I don't know why Go has decided to go this way, but I do see at least one advantage to using increment and decrement statements instead of assignments: increment and decrement make your intentions clear . Anyone (including yourself) who later reads your code knows that it's not accident or happenstance that you're moving by 1s; it's fully intentional. If there's a bug and this is not the right increment, you may need to look at larger sections of the algorithm, not just change a constant and see if it works; similarly if you now need to move in different strides.

In a related thing, it's also more visually distinctive. Increment and decrement statements stand out, partly because they don't have an = , and probably read faster since you don't have to parse the number when scanning them.

This wouldn't be enough to justify them in a minimal language, but in a pragmatic language like Go I'm glad they exist. Incrementing and decrementing things is common enough that it's nice to have a compact and distinctive idiom that makes your intentions clear.

Sidebar: The operator versus statement distinction here

C has increment and decrement operators . You can use ++ and -- in any context just like other operators, so you can write:

i = j++ * 10 - fred(k++);

And other equally complicated expressions. Often the complications arise with pointers in various contexts.

Go has increment and decrement only as statements , not as operators (and this is deliberate ). That line is invalid Go; as statements, ++ and -- must occur on their own, not as part of expressions in assignment statements, function calls, and so on.