[gecko]

I think this may be specific to Google's situation--at least for now. PyPI may not be as comprehensive as CPAN, but it's rare these days that I can't "pip install" my way into having half the solution done before I start writing code. The same simply isn't (yet) true for Go.

Google has many custom components, though. I personally don't write Go nearly as quickly as I write Python, but I have 4+ years of writing Python in everything from tiny scripts up to large applications, both for the desktop and for the web. I have maybe twenty to forty hours of experience writing Go code, absolute tops. It's not a fair comparison. If we assume that the Googlers who are claiming to be more productive in Go than Python have a couple orders of magnitude on me, and that they don't need many prefabricated libraries, and I find the claim plausible.

I don't believe it'd currently be true in the general case, though.

[stock_toaster]

In addition to your custom components point, I wonder if licensing restrictions come into play at all. I am not familiar with Google's policy on use of external code based on license of said code. If there is, hypothetically, a policy to use code for internal projects of only certain licenses, then pypi (generally) may be slightly less useful to them.

If they were re-implementing a significant amount of code then go may indeed be more productive.

[hugs]

They do have a policy regarding external code. It's called "third-party". Google has one big shared code-repo. Generally, the only requirement is to plop the code into the directory called "third-party" and make sure its license is clearly visible. If it's good code, yet "external", Googler's won't have a problem finding a way to use it in there projects.