[brudgers]

Strategically, the hiring pipeline for Google doesn't matter. It can train new hires in Go or whatever, it's historically hired around non-language competencies to some degree. What matters is being able to introduce breaking changes by leading the development effort and hosting critical repositories: e.g. 1.4 broke subrepository references by changing locations.

Strategically, incipient potential competitors have a dependency on Google and those little breaking changes means that Google can add friction to their development pipeline. Google will, even if it didn't say so on the package, Angular 1 vs. 2 is an example of how willing Google is to leave developers in the lurch and create ecosystem FUD...think of all those now dubious tutorials and "should I wait" forum questions.

I don't think its just happenstance that Erlang allowed Whatsapp to become an existential threat to Facebook with a handful of engineers. Language stability matters for startups more than the big boys.

YMMV.