Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldWideWayne | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of how I feel about Go as a language... I don't trust Google to perform well as the steward. It may be open source, but that means nothing if people stop working on it.

If it doesn't become popular, I think they will just let it die. If they start trying to make it popular, I think there will be a big push back from the great unwashed masses of people who want obvious features and then it will die. Only time will tell.

View on HN

I don't think you have to trust Google, you just have to trust the core team. While they all work for Google now, the language is open source and they have reputations that extend well beyond their time at Google. I share your distrust of Google, but I trust Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and the rest of the team enough that I don't worry about choosing Go. I have faith that if Google kills it or starts to misbehave, the team will leave and figure out a way to keep the language moving forward.

I understand what you're saying but I think it also goes to my point - I feel like those handful of people couldn't possibly do as much to get Golang into the mainstream as could a whole company/divisional effort. I honestly don't feel like Google as a company is putting that much effort into Golang and many of their other projects.

Remember when they were building Chrome and how quickly they iterated on it? That was awesome to behold! Maybe a slow pace and a smaller user base is better for developing a language, but if that's the case then I guess I'll just wait another decade before really investing time into Golang.

Who's the steward of your language of choice?

Languages of choice...but shouldn't matter who it is. Why draw comparisons that will only serve to evoke political and ideological responses? I think that my suspicion of Google's capacity to perform here is warranted and that's really all I have to say about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com