my friend, I am not anti Google or anti Go. 1 year in tech is like 10 years in real life. I am glad you mention "systems development" but Google is marketing or at least the Go lang site is marketing it as a mainstream application development language. The repeated thing I hear and see is Go is fast and simple, which I don't disagree. If it is so simple and fast why is this not even listed in any of the rankings at http://langpop.com/

Before java was even officially released colleges were teaching Java classes. I remember it, cause I took the class and I still have the book that says covers beta. That's how popular java was. We were wowed by animations (feels funny to think about it now) and how easy it was to write screen savers, moving robots and shooting games. This is not the 90s. Look at the success of Android development (different topic). It came from freakN no where wowed everybody. Made stupid HTC (who knew about it before Android) a huge competitor of Apple. We are wowed not by what a programming language can do (this is what we are getting from Google) but by it's demo implementation. Again, look at Android, App Inventor and google has tons of such examples. Go marketing team (if there is one) failed miserably in my opinion.