[dewitt]

Everything you said is true, of course, but I think it applies more generally to inexperienced startups with first-time technical founders, or larger corporations with a "B" technical staff.

In this case, you're talking about Dropbox, which already has achieved the scale, in both the large and small senses, that require a deeper level of problem solving than simply switching languages would provide.

Even if I personally find Go an odd choice for this project (why not C++, which already has the library support they need, and much more?), their present-day successes demonstrate that they didn't expect a scalability panacea from Go, just a better runtime for a subset of their critical path code.