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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Google has a bunch of internal languages that are only used within it, don't enjoy a wider adoption, and get deprecated.

Facebook created Hack, a version of PHP with a quite nice static type system, which is virtually not used outside it. They also had an early statically typed version of JavaScript, called Flow, which enjoyed a limited success, but was supplanted by Typescript.

Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Smalltalk, etc all enjoyed some success in specific narrow domains, while influencing heavily such mainstream languages as Python, Java, Typescript, Rust, and, well, Go.

Compared to this, Go is unreasonably, blindingly successful; it's now all over the place, but that was hard to predict back in the early days of the project.

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Early on it was risky to choose go, as it really wasn’t clear if go could achieve mainstream adoption. That said, in hindsight, it really should have been obvious. If I myself saw its benefits over the incumbents, I should have realized I wasn’t the only one. That said, go is old enough that google still had a lot of its older more positive “high skilled elite cool programmer” image, so perhaps that really helped the language along. I’m not sure. Today I’d be much more hesitant to pick up a google language.

At a previous job we decided against Go because it's made by Google, and Google has a habit of killing products.

This is exactly what I was thinking about. Back then there wasn’t an anti google sentiment (or if so, it wasn’t strong) But now this sentiment would hinder a new language. Thankfully go has launched well enough that I think it can live on and shed itself of any potential negative associations some people might have.

Sure, as they say in Google, for technologies you always have two options: the new which is experimental and not yet supported and the old that is depreciated because there will be a new coming anyways.

When I was there the saying was that "V2 isn't ready yet and V1 n't as deprecated"

It's impressive the go team managed to buck the trend and only got to V2 after so many years.

> Facebook created Hack, a version of PHP with a quite nice static type system, which is virtually not used outside it.

Well there’s at least Slack, and another huge project (which has eventually migrated away from it once PHP has improved) with tens of millions of users. There has to be others, too.

hack was created at meta for meta...

Still Hack and HVVM are open source and anyone who cares can use them.

Go was also created at Google and for Google first and foremost, but ended up wildly popular in general.

(React was also created at Meta and for Meta. Same with Pytorch.)

cmon. nobody in their right mind is using hack outside of Meta

at least single example in open source or in enterprise who is running Hack? haven't seen even one in 8 years

https://slack.engineering/streamlining-your-workflow-debuggi...

> which is especially useful when writing strongly-typed code to support variable payload structures in API calls.

I shouldn't be surprised, that's like the ideal scenario for PHP. So of course they added strong typing to it.

wow. no way... slack is on hack! is this toy project for them or some sub-system? hard to believe. interesting if this is true!

My point exactly.

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