[coldtea]

>So, it's previous analogs are Java and C#? That doesn't feel quite right, either, in that Google makes no money from Go; Java and C# are both direct moneymakers for their respective stewards.

Well, Google doesn't put as much money into Go either (as MS and Sun put into Java and C#). Sun and C# had much bigger teams, much bigger budgets, and tons of marketing money spent on them, including actual ads everywhere. Just the team writing the C# documentation was probably bigger than the whole Google Go team.

But that's relative:

Unlike most OSS/community driven languages (e.g. Nim or Julia), Go has a big enough team that's paid to work on Go. That makes a difference.