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Comment by jiqiren | Hacker News Reader

The Go Language.

Go was made by a small group of smart people with debatable loyalty to Google. Google just ran with it, and they haven't done a great job with it since.

I'm not sure what you mean by debatable loyalty. The creators of the language have all worked at the company for more than 10 years and support the product for internal users.

Can you put your grinding axe away and stick entirely to facts and technical merits?

Look, Go has way more to do with the experience of its creators than with their contact with the engineering culture of Google. The influences from Plan 9, Inferno, Limbo, and so on are all extremely apparent in Golang's design and were all born outside of Google. Very little of Google's spirit made it into Go.

I don't know how you got from "debatable loyalty to Google" to "the language was mostly inspired by Bell Labs tech, rather than Google", which is perfectly fine. But it doesn't explain your animosity and refusal to discuss based on technical merits, rather than just (what is clearly) axe-grinding.

Note that Go ended up being a major language within Google for a wide range of systems (even replacing systems built previously by the Go developers, such as sawzall), so rather than saying "debatable loyalty to google", might it not be better to say that the developers worked to transform Google from the inside to be less dependent on C++ and Java?

I retract "debatable loyalty to Google". I meant something more along the lines of "debatably attributable to Google's engineering", i.e. a statement directly in support of my main argument.

> support the product for internal users

That right there is evidence they don't have Google's best interests at heart.

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