[SkyMarshal]

It might even have been a missed opportunity. Brin (or better yet Page) could have posted a public reply that said, to the effect of:

Yegge is absolutely right, I've been thinking along similar lines recently, and now is a great opportunity to do something about it. I'm issuing the same edict as Bezos - every Google product must expose its full functionality via public API. From today, Yegge is in charge of coordinating and making it happen. etc etc

One of the issues that Google seems to face is that a form of technical debt is catching up with them. They've had the same three officially approved languages for a decade now - C++, Java, Python - with Go on the way to becoming a fourth. But that rules out interesting new ones like Scala, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell that might 1) be good tools for particular projects, and 2) attract great developers.

Requiring all their products to interact via published API only might enable increased polyglot programming and a more diverse and interesting tech ecosystem.

Just speculating on all this, but I do wonder...

[MrMan]

Must take issue with one point - whatever technical debt they may have amassed has little to do, I suspect, with holding on to the same boring old programming languages too long.

The shareholders should fire Brin if he suggests re-writing boring old "legacy" code in a sexy new language!

[SkyMarshal]

Haha, I certainly didn't mean to imply any of Google's current stuff should be rewritten. It's all very high quality, performant. Rather, I was thinking of new projects that might benefit from other languages or platforms.

[Tichy]

Who knows, maybe Yegge is wrong? Not saying he is, but what makes everybody so sure they know the best future strategy for Google?