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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"I think the biggest reason for Go's success is that is it incredibly accessible. Everything around and in Go is ergonomic, well documented, easy to understand and clean. It is a language that cares about the tooling and social aspects as first class concepts."

And most programmers probably wouldn't even know about it having any of those features if it didn't have a famous backer like Google and a famous name like Rob Pike attached to it.

Marketing definitely makes a difference. Whether it made a critical difference in this case is certainly debatable, however, as some languages (like Python) succeeded even before they had buy-in and support from big names. Though, there again, Python had a lot of help from marketing.. it was just that it was marketing of a different kind, from its users rather from any company backing it.

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> Python had a lot of help from marketing.. it was just that it was marketing of a different kind, from its users [...]

Perl, Tcl, Python (all scripting, I know) are (iiuc) examples that came to be without a juggernaut behind them, but then to say they had a different kind of marketing behind them is sort of tautological, no? People liked those languages and talked about it. That’s just human nature.

When mention the effect of marketing by users, I mean to distinguish that from choosing a language based on its technical merits. There's a certain amount of buzz and bandwagon effect that plays in to the success of popular languages, and, yes, languages like Perl, Tcl, and Python had it too.

That's a different sort of marketing, though, from the buzz created by having famous/respected names attached to the languges, like Go had in Google and Rob Pike.

- Perl, Active State and was a standard language in most UNIXes

- Tcl, was backed by Active State and Sun for a long time

- Python, all the renowned companies Guido worked for

"Marketing" means money.

There was never any money behind Python, or C++. Both paid their own way, all the way: people actually using one put in sweat because they believed it made things better for them.

That is the diametrical opposite of marketing.

Never any money in c++, pretty sure Bell labs funded bjorne

Bell Labs paid his salary, but they paid it before C++ as much as after, and would have paid it without. If others had not taken up C++, he would have gone on to other things. C++'s unique contribution was the destructor, not adopted elsewhere until D and then Rust.

The contrast is against Sun spending literally $billions on Java puffery. Go has put a lot more support into Go, by that standard, but still barely $millions, if that.

What specifically makes people look up to Mr Pike so much? Is one of his projects in particular, or just his accumulated contributions?

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