[Tozen]

While I agree that corporate support plays a huge role with market share and acceptance, I disagree that Go would have been laughed out of the room. Very likely that a language made by Griesemer, Pike, and Thompson would have got lots of attention. Arguably enough to catch on anyway. These men are already famous, in programming circles. Case in point, look at Jai, with just the star power of Jonathan Blow and how well known that it is. In fact, would not bet against just Ken Thompson (by himself), creating a new language and whether or not it would catch on.

[clhodapp]

I don't think that Jai is a very good example. I doubt a single one of my coworkers will have heard of it but they've all heard of Go.

[jasonjmcghee]

For another voice in the room, I know who Jonathan Blow is, relatively familiar with his work, I think he's making a game engine? And know he does coding streams, and don't think I've heard of Jai.

And I know plenty of software folks who wouldn't know who he is at all.

[badpun]

Jai is still in closed beta, it's not being promoted at all yet.

[nektro]

jai is not well known and it being a language and closed source makes it a total non-starter

[c_crank]

I don't think it would be so well regarded when considering the motivation that Rob Pike and Ken Thompson had for making the language the way they did.

[bobbylarrybobby]

What was their motivation?

[c_crank]

“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”

Creating a tool that the constant stream of fresh out of college guys can't screw up with.

[bobbylarrybobby]

I see. And this is why there is no Maybe type, and an “unset” value is silently set to 0? Because fresh grads would find this easy to work with?

[c_crank]

In general, the language lacks both complex features and low level primitives that would be useful for building anything more substantial than network glue code. Go codebases are often noted for the egregious use of copy and paste. Not that I can say that there's never a time and place for that, but it's not the kind of thing you'd be excited to work with. Give me the language Ken Thompson would solve problems in, not the language he gives his goons to solve problems in.

[jokethrowaway]

I think the issue is that it's hard to trust the language to go over its current limitations without commercial backing.

This is especially true for a language like Go which had limited functionality and a complete lack of tooling (eg. no package manager, no generics) for a long time.

I didn't pick up Rust until a few killer projects were released. Before that async was a complete mess. For a long time we didn't have the ? operator.

[guenthert]

> In fact, would not bet against just Ken Thompson (by himself), creating a new language and whether or not it would catch on.

You mean like Limbo?