"This isn't just about Haskell either: most other PL research is also about making programming lives easier. And Go ignores essentially all of it."
That's a bold statement, and I'm not sure that's what Rob Pike is asserting. I saw his presentation as saying "We knowingly made tradeoffs in the programming language to, in part, make managing large codebases tractable." He's right in saying that dependency management isn't intrinsic in most of programming language theory today, and it's a big productivity sink for development organizations with very large codebases.
Slides eight and nine, to me at least, suggest by the implicit contrast between research and helping programmers that the Go designers just weren't interested in the state of PL research.
That is because PL research isn't interested in helping programmers write programs under their real world constraints. Pike isn't interested in what geologists have to say about programming languages either.
That's a bold statement, and I'm not sure that's what Rob Pike is asserting. I saw his presentation as saying "We knowingly made tradeoffs in the programming language to, in part, make managing large codebases tractable." He's right in saying that dependency management isn't intrinsic in most of programming language theory today, and it's a big productivity sink for development organizations with very large codebases.