[andrewprock]

Given Pike's extensive experience inside a world of his own making (Plan 9 and Go), it's entirely reasonable to attribute the misconception that Go is a system language to Pike's idiosyncratic use of the phrase.

If I understand things correctly, Go came about as fallout related to the non-scalability of Python and the massive technical debt associated with Python within Google. The projects to automagically port Python code to Go code are a clear indicator that Go was at least in part imagined as a replacement for Python.

I personally wouldn't describe Python as a systems language, but some might.

[mindcrime]

Pike's idiosyncratic use of the phrase.

There's nothing idiosyncratic about it. "Systems Programming" has meant a lot more than just "operating systems" for at least as long as I've been doing this stuff, which dates back into the 90's. Maybe in some earlier age it was the case that "Systems Programming" was limited to "operating systems" but if so, it was quite some time ago. Language evolves...

[yumaikas]

Actually, Go was born out of a desire to make something better than c++ for google scale and style use. https://commandcenter.blogspot.it/2012/06/less-is-exponentia...

It just happens that Go is a better replacement for python than c++ in the general case.

[andrewprock]

Yeah, one of the cool things about go is it's ability to get reasonable compile times without byzantine management of include files, as in c++. I still don't know of any major c++ code base being targeted by go, whereas python is certainly in the crosshairs.