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Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

> full force of Google pushing it

This trope is getting old. Variations include "Go is only popular because Google spends millions marketing it!". There is a small team at Google that work on the language along with the open source community. I'm pretty sure none of Google's marketing team works to promote the language, and I'm sure that its success is much less important to Google than Erlang's success was to Ericcson. I don't know very much about Ericcson, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out they spent many times the amount on Erlang that Google spends on Go.

There are probably lots of reasons why Go is successful, but I'm positive that it has more to do with simplicity, learning curve, tooling, ecosystem, etc than it does with corporate sponsorship or marketing.

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Ericsson abandoned Erlang, or Erlang abandoned Ericsson, depending on how you look: Ericsson banned it internally, and shortly afterwards when the Erlang team managed to get it open sourced, they resigned from Ericsson and founded their own Erlang company.

(source: http://webcem01.cem.itesm.mx:8005/erlang/cd/downloads/hopl_e...)

Armstrong was rehired by Ericsson in 2004 [1], and a team at Ericsson maintains the language today (see e.g. [2]).

1: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2006-July/02136... 2: http://blog.erlang.org/

So does Ericsson still use Erlang in their recent network hardware etc?

I recall hearing no, somewhere. I am under the understanding, (don't know where from) that Cisco DOES use Erlang in their stack, and there is a group of people at VMware that does.

Thanks. This is something where simple internet search yields nothing much. Possibly because these network switches are proprietary platforms and they do not publish how internals are implemented.

I found the Cisco reference https://twitter.com/guieevc/status/1002494428748140544?s=09

Yes. After a few years of ban, Ericsson changed gears. The recent head of tech at Ericsson look at that past as a real miss. All Ericsson 3G switch/router are in Erlang.

Ericsson has a small team maintaining erlang and they are the steward of Erlang.

> This trope is getting old. Variations include "Go is only popular because Google spends millions marketing it!".

I chose Angular.js because of google actually. And then Google did me dirty with Angular 2.

Corporate sponsorship is actually a huge driving for my decision and many company too.

Having a big company is a good indicator of success and it says that that programming language will have a stable contributors. Google also are using Go so they also have a stable programmers within the ecosystem.

Getting developers to adopt a tech and be in it is hard. Google have bunch of their dev in it and which increase the chances of these dev will present and talk in meetup to evangelicalize others.

Very true. Go has proven big success outside Google.

So many people here argue here that Go is not good enough else why Google keep using other languages even now. But same people argue in Apple/Swift case "of course Apple need not rewrite all perfectly working applications in Swift". But somehow Google has to do to prove language is fine.

> There is a small team at Google that work on the language

How many languages are lucky enough to have paid developers working on them?

Many languages have been labours of love with 1 developer getting paid, at best, pennies or doing it on the side.

I think there's a reasonable middle ground where you can claim "Go made good choices, but it also wouldn't exist as it does nor be as popular without google throwing money at its developers and without the brand association"

For example, the D programming language was wonderfully made and had many great features, but it never got all that far, in part because "Built by Mars" isn't as good as "Built by Google".

Sure, Go didn't just win by default because google was there (Dart is a good proof that Google doesn't instantly make languages succeed), but I'm certain having their backing and name association sure didn't hurt.

If Pike, Thompson, Cox et al. had stayed at Bell Labs, they would have created Go there as salaried researchers? Or because no one would have forced them to do C++, they maybe would not have bothered... ;-)

Who do you think pays for almost all of Go's development?

I don't think most of this is true... the Go core team is at least 20ish people, and that's just engineers not PMs, Managers, or other support staff. Plus the tools and kubernetes/gcloud teams. It's also kind of disingenuous to call any team lead by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson "small"... yeah they might not have hundreds of people but they can certainly wield a hell of a lot of influence.

Google also spends quite a decent amount promoting Go and donating to OSS that promotes Go.

You're not wrong about the comparison to Ericcson/Erlang though, or most of the reasons for Go's success, but you can't discount the Google factor.

Anecdotally, there are at least three people at work who say that "go is used at google so it will be around forever and I can be sure there will be support for it".

I'm sure somebody said the same thing about GWT too.

I actually really loved GWT and it was a shame it withered and died.

Tooling and ecosystem: Yes, but how much did Google spend on developing the tooling and ecosystem? Forget the marketing - libraries, tooling, and ecosystem are where corporate support pays off for a language.

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