I think this isn't quite true. From my perspective, Go did get a massive boost but not from Google. The language was originally designed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson.

It is fair to say that without those names attached I would have likely passed it by. Google is boring, but those three names, for me at least, I had to take a look.

If Google could make a language popular, where does Dart fit into the story? People seem to love Go, and with very little encouragement from Google. I don't see a lot of love for Dart...though everyone who's played with it seems to like it well enough.

Dart was betrayed by Chrome and Angular teams as they decided to drop support for it.

Let's see if Flutter and Fuschia teams manage to push adoption for Dart.

Someone said this and it feels correct: it is not a bad language, but it is also not a good language.

> Google & adoption

I think it helped get around the initial cycle of drawing in the curious. An argument counter to claims regarding the importance of the people involved would point out Plan9 etc. that are hardly widely known, much less adopted.

In sum, I think the role of Google in one becoming a Go programmer depends entirely on when it happened. Today, of course Go has its own brand name. 8 years ago, it was Google that eased the debutante phase of the language.