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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

What's up with having two different new experimental languages from Google on the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33756800 - did Google just happen to release them at the same time?

I think when Carbon came out people's reaction was stronger than deserved (like saying that Google don't believe in Rust, or that Go has been a failure because it hasn't replaced C++ etc.) while in reality all of this is very experimental and very early in its development. I kind of expect similar reactions to Rune and Mangle with some people trying to make a big deal out of nothing.

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This isn't an official Google project, the contributions seem mostly from one person, so probably someone doing this as a 20% project. Carbon OTOH has a team working on it AFAIK.

And it’s not new, either. First commits to the repo are well over a year old.

That's pretty new for a programming language.

The project GP was accusing them of name sniping is only a few months older.

Promotion cycle, new unfinished languages.

"I open sourced some internal project, it has no adoption and no mindshare and no plan to achieve either of these things" isn't going to make for a successful promo.

"Hey I built a thing, let's toss it over the wall but let people know what not to expect" is a perfectly fine thing for anybody to do.

It seems like somebody got too easy access to the Google Github repo. Usually only higher quality projects get approved to the central repo.

If I remember correctly we were supposed to have our personal projects there.

Since Google owns the copyright it almost makes sense.

Also, being in the Google organization doesn't mean that Google is involved in it. I'm maintaining a project there (`google/double-conversion`), despite not having worked for Google for years. Nobody at Google has any influence or reviews on that project.

This. Google’s policy is kind of dumb (I write a lot of stuff for fun that no one wants the ownership of… The primary value is I learned something that I can use later on something important),but pretty much any experimental thing some one at Google works on will wind up there even on their free time.

Wrong. This is in a late state, and very high quality.

And Google is not really known to release high quality projects overall. Only some of them are.

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