[psychoslave]

Go had the name of its authors to weight in. While I'm not of the type to give high weight in term of technical assessment. And I don't even mean C is praisable in term of influence it had on the industry. But without a doubt it did impact it deeply over a very long span of time. And at larger scale many people do love to follow their unquestionable prophets.

[pjmlp]

Being at Google helped, not that Alef, Limbo, Newsqueak and Oberon-2 were that huge commercial successes, and there is also the question how much influence would have C had in the industry if AT&T would be selling it from the get go, instead of the way UNIX and C were freely distributed across universities.

Many times it isn't the quality of the programming language alone, rather external factors that trigger its adoption.