You're right. Here's what Ian Lance Taylor (one of the Go developers) said:

"Robert asked me to take a look at his code and I hacked on it for an hour to make a little bit nicer. If I had realized that he was going to publish it externally I would have put a lot more time into making it nicer."

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/G8L4af-Q9WE/MNY-...