[vancan1ty]

Your post does not address Raymond's arguments, but instead primarily just attacks the messenger as supposedly not being qualified to comment on language trends.

While it may be true that ESR is not a superstar programmer in the image of a John Carmack or a Bill Gates, he has been a working C developer for over 30 years, and has contributed to numerous open-source projects, including systems projects, over that period of time. The examples he lists in the article are some pieces of software which he is currently a maintainer for.

Actually I think the fact that he is not a superstar programmer with a signature project possibly makes him a bit more qualified to comment on language trends. After all, most of the developers in the industry are by definition about average, and if average (or even somewhat above average) developers are finding their productivity much higher in Python and Go than they do in C, then they will start doing more work in those languages and less in C. In fact, that transition is exactly what ESR is describing in the article.

Certainly it seems that Go is usable for certain classes of problems that would formerly have been C's domain.

[AstralStorm]

If by productivity you count the number of programs written, Python is not even close to Java.

I'd by productivity you count time to solution, a lot of applications written in python do not have performance requirements, which makes the comparison very unfair.

I cannot say for Golang.