[coldtea]

>Go was designed at Google to be used internally at Google

That's not true, expect in a pedantic way. Google was "designed at Google to be used internally at Google" only in that:

(a) a few people at Google, on their own, designed a language (mostly based on an older Plan 9 language some had helped built) - not at the request of Google execs, nor as an explicit company-mandated project to create a language to solve Google's problems. It was almost on of these "20% spare time" things.

(b) these people added the features that they thought, as far as they were concerned that would be nice for programming Google style stuff. Those were based on their ad-hoc (and quite idiosyncratic) intuition and personal experience, and not some special research into programming at scale, or from involving the company at large at it.

Go was designed at Google, but not "from Google", if this makes sense. E.g. a few googler's building a language on their own initiative and among other work is not the same as Google, i.e. some higher-ups, saying "we need a language of our own that's a match for our developers' challenges" and the company devoting resources for this.

Google has 2 language projects they really put money on, Javascript as V8 and Dart. They built a top notch specialist team, spent lots of money for promotion and branding, built an IDE and developer tools for both, etc.

Apple has had Obj-C and now Swift like that, MS has C#, etc. Those are language projects with a big weight of the companies behind them.

Golang was not like that, but, according to all official accounts and recollections, a grassroots project, by a small team:

"Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson started sketching the goals for a new language on the white board on September 21, 2007. Within a few days the goals had settled into a plan to do something and a fair idea of what it would be. Design continued part-time in parallel with unrelated work. By January 2008, Ken had started work on a compiler with which to explore ideas; it generated C code as its output. By mid-year the language had become a full-time project and had settled enough to attempt a production compiler. In May 2008, Ian Taylor independently started on a GCC front end for Go using the draft specification. Russ Cox joined in late 2008 and helped move the language and libraries from prototype to reality."

It was never officially intended to be "Google's development language" or had a major push from Google. Since then, and after the first few years, Google seems to have devoted more money and time to Go, and several Google internal projects have adopted it, but Google is fine with C++, Java, and Python as well.

[skybrian]

It seems like you're setting up a false dichotomy. Researchers working at a company are often thinking about solving company problems, even if their particular solution doesn't have management support yet. Getting official approval often involves advocates selling their particular solution to management.

In particular, language designers typically have concrete problems in mind, even if they're inventing a general-purpose language. It's enough to say that Go's designers expected to use their new language at Google, so it needed to work well in Google's environment and solve some problems that weren't currently being solved well in that environment. If it didn't work at Google, then they wouldn't have succeeded at their original goal.

While it's not the most popular language at Google, Go is officially supported for server-side projects (communicating via RPC with many other internal servers), and has been for some time. That's a high bar that few languages meet, and about as official as it gets. If it didn't succeed internally then the Go team probably wouldn't have had consistent management support and stable funding over many years.

The other languages you mention (Dart and JavaScript) are considered client-side only within Google so they mostly don't compete with Go. For example, Node is supported for developer tools and external users, not because Google runs its own servers using Node. (Or at least that was true when I left.)

[cmrdporcupine]

I don't think it's a false dichotomy. I don't think the teams that originally worked on the development of the Go language were Google production engineers of any sort.

I've been working at Google for 8 years and have yet to touch a Go codebase in production.

It's just not used that frequently.

[skybrian]

If we're sharing anecdotes, I didn't write any C++ in over a decade at Google.

But I'm not going to dispute that it's the most-used server-side language, because I've seen the statistics.

[coldtea]

How about the statistics you've seen on Go?

[skybrian]

I don't remember (other than being up and to the right) and it seems not to be published.

[coldtea]

>Researchers working at a company are often thinking about solving company problems, even if their particular solution doesn't have management support yet

Yes.

But it's another thing to have a company's the management, say "we want a team to create a language to solve programming at our scale" and throw full resources and money at it (at C#/Java/V8/Swift scale) and have it adopted by mandate for further development,

(as is often implied),

and another thing to have an independent group of a few devs at a company to sit on their own, and say "you know what would be interesting to try to build? A language to handle what we see as Google scale problems", and then getting some more resources, and seeing some at the company adopting it, as just one more language used along with several other company-approved languages for greenfield stuff...

[skybrian]

Uh, Google is unlikely to standardize on a single language. The codebase is too big, the incumbent languages are too well entrenched, and they've heavily invested in supporting multiple languages. I'm not sure anyone claimed that either?

If anything the trend is towards slowly adding acceptable languages, but the bar is pretty high.