[9rx]

Oh...? Dart never gained much steam. And let's not forget about Carbon! Can you name even just one person who has tried Carbon? Have more than a handful of people even heard of Carbon?

I will grant you that Carbon is still in its infancy, but when Rust was in the same youthful stage we never heard an end to all the people playing with it. You, even if not tried it yourself, definitely knew about it.

You've made up a fun idea, but reality doesn't support it. Google has not shown its weight carries anything. They have really struggled to get any for-profit business units off the ground since they gained the weight, never mind their hobbies! If anything, Google is detrimental to a project.

[pjmlp]

Already explained in another thread, learn the politics of Dart, and Carbon is still on the drawing board.

[geodel]

So failures are some deep valid reasons whereas success is developers don't know any better language.

[pjmlp]

Many don't, otherwise they would not do stuff like using Python for performance workloads.

Lets also not forget Rob Pike famous quote regarding simple minds, as target audience.

As for Go, Kubernetes made it unavoidable, it is like UNIX for C, Web for JavaScript, and so forth.

[9rx]

> Many don't, otherwise they would not do stuff like using Python for performance workloads.

While you fairly point out that many fall into Python because they learned about it in school and never bother to look beyond, Go has had no such equivalent. For you to choose it, you have to actively seek it out, where you are going to also see all the other programming languages you could also choose.

> As for Go, Kubernetes made it unavoidable, it is like UNIX for C, Web for JavaScript, and so forth.

UNIX's programming interface is a set of C functions. You are right that C is the path of least resistance to use it.

The web's programming interface is Javascript. You are right that Javascript is the path of least resistance to use it.

Kubernetes' programming interface is a "REST API" – or your program running inside a container, if you want to look at it from the other direction. In what way is Go the path of least resistance to use it?

[9rx]

Already...? Said "explanation" was posted over an hour after the comment replied to here.

If only Google put their weight into a watch, maybe you'd have one?

Oh wait. They did! Google can't successfully turn their weight into much of anything. Go's success, if we can call it that, clearly happened in spite of Google.

[stouset]

Googlers aren’t expected to wear a Google-branded watch at work. They are expected to write go. Having an entire Google’s worth of programmers using your programming language isn’t exactly a minor influence.

[9rx]

> They are expected to write go.

Like who? Outside of Go itself, which is really more of a community project — albeit with the chief maintainers still on Google's payroll, almost nothing at Google is written in Go. In fact, Pike once gave a talk reflecting on why it didn't succeed in that space, and noted that it was the "Python and Ruby programmers" who actually ended up adopting it.

Google makes money selling services (i.e. Google Cloud) that run Kubernetes, Docker, etc. If it weren't for that, it is unlikely that Google would even be continuing to maintain it at this point. It was an interesting experiment, perhaps, but ultimately a failure within Google. As before, it was the Python and (probably most especially) Ruby communities that ended up leaning into it.

Which isn't surprising in hindsight. Go offered those who were using Python and Ruby a language that was in the same kind of vein, while solving many of the pain points they were experiencing with Python and Ruby (awful deployment strategies, terrible concurrency stories, trouble with performance, etc.) These developers were never going to use Haskell. They wanted Ruby with less problems.

And that's what Go gave them — at least to the extent of being better than any other attempt to do the same. Since it solved real problems people had, without forcing them into new programming paradigms, it was adopted. Choosing a technology based on starry-eyed fandom and arbitrary feelings might be how you go about navigating this world, but that doesn't extrapolate.

[geodel]

> They are expected to write go.

This got to be a joke right. The only thing I hear is at Google no one likes Go. Most software is in C++, Rust, Java or Kotlin.

[stouset]

Necessary and sufficient are two separate concepts.