I've heard great points and experienced myself how utterly legible go is. But nobody on earth has ever praised anything about the language design itself. I wonder if go came from somewhere not google- how would it fare.
Dart struggled for years to find a killer app, though Flutter now seems to be a good bet.
Originally the idea was to replace JavaScript and everyone except TypeScript pretty much failed at that. (I mean failed from a popularity point of view, they often succeeded technically.)
I'll also point out that coming from Google is kind of a mixed blessing these days, from a popularity standpoint.
Also since Go is "hypocritically Object Oriented", people can claim it's not an object oriented language and kind of write Go like classic structured programming such as C. But Go is OO. You can't write go without using interfaces for I/O.
You can and people do that all the time. You don't have to use its standard library I/O APIs, even its syscall package.
I'm not disagreeing that Go is OO though. Its ecosystem is dominated by OO. But it's more like Perl in this regard, where you can spend years without writing a single line of OO code yourself even if you have to use other people's OO code.
There was a precursor to golang that the some of the same authors worked on before they were at Google. It didn't go anywhere, precisely because it didn't have Google's name behind it.
For example its CSP concurrency model, similar to Go, was hardly pertinent when common processors were 150 MHz Pentiums with 1 core. Completely different scenarios.
Not to mention Bell Labs had enormous influence on Computer Science at the time so it's not like Limbo had no strong backing either.
There was always demand for having servers that processed high numbers of requests (e.g. C10K). Just because single core processing was common does not mean that there wasn't need for high concurrency.
> Not to mention Bell Labs had enormous influence on Computer Science at the time so it's not like Limbo had no strong backing either.
In those days there was less fad driven development compared to what we see today. So the effect wasn't as pronounced.
Demand is not binary. In 1995 the demand for concurrency was a fraction what it is today. Not only multicore processing was an extremely rare sighting in comparison to what we have today but also:
1. Internet was accessed by 10% of the population vs today's 80%+
2. Capable smartphones? First iPhone came only 12 years later. There was no such thing as internet during commute.
3. C10K for example was coined only in 1999.
The 20 years between 1995 and 2015 did change the IT landscape wildly regardless of your beliefs.
Just because multicore wasn't common doesn't mean that concurrency wasn't important. Event loops have practically always been there on widely used OS's.