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Comment by OtterCoder | Hacker News Reader

Which failed in its stated mission and fell back to being yet another just-ok web scripting language.

Java also has been a phenomenal success, just not as a language for applets.

Um...what? Are you thinking of Dart?

Go initially billed itself as a language for systems programming, but that claim was quickly retracted when it turned out that Go's creators had a different notion of systems programming than everyone else.

Not everyone. Just self-proclaimed authority who decided systems means operating system or some embedded code. Lots of companies I worked have title Systems Engineer or departments Systems engineering which has nothing to do with Operating systems but just some internal applications.

> Just self-proclaimed authority who decided systems means operating system or some embedded code

Systems does mean that. There are 2 broad categories of software you can write. One is software that provides a service to the user directly. That is an application. The other kind is software that provides a service to applications. That's systems software. Do you think there's something wrong with this notion? It's pretty well accepted over the decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming

Sure, and Go's most prolific users are in infrastructure software for distributed systems. You seem to agree with the quoted statement.

Well by that definition Docker, Kubernetes, etcd and so on are systems software. But people here somehow explicitly make it to mean Computer Operating Systems.

By this definition, Python and JavaScript are systems languages.

This was all over with way before the 1.0 release even happened. There's no point in arguing over something that was addressed several years ago before Go even reached stability. Plus, trying to say that Go was a "failure" because of this is absurd. It was an issue of terminology, not technology. Given Kubernetes, Docker, etc you would have to be totally delusional to claim that Go has been a failure.

30 years is a good time frame to judge a programming language.

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