[masklinn]

> It also has the benefit of the team implementing the language actually dogfooding it, causing natural evolutionary improvements.

On the other hand, a big risk is that the language will evolve towards being better at writing compilers, which is a highly idiosyncratic task.

[rsc]

Yes, that is a real risk. I have written about this before. It's much more of a risk at the start, when there are no other sizable programs. Now there are plenty of sizable Go programs, so I am not worried about overfitting to compiler development.

[girvo]

cough OCaml cough

I jest, but, "ha ha only seriously". It's an interesting problem when writing languages in themselves, that you need to try not to make your language great for writing compilers and nothing else!