Google also can't be convinced to carry a project through to completion and release /salty.

Google is very good in marketing. For example go.

Why do people say this? What marketing has Google ever done for Go?

Sponsoring Go introduction workshops for university undergrads, complete with Google-swag prizes and actual Google employees flown in from another country.

So, quite a lot if that experience is anything to go by.

I will say that my professor Axel Schreiner at RIT offered one of the two first Golang classes at a collegiate level back in... 2009? and he reached out to Google and said, "send us some Android phones so that we can develop Go on ARM"

They obliged with a full crate of first generation Motorola phones, each one preloaded with a 30 day free Verizon plan. Every person who took that class got one, and surely all of them made it back into the school's hands at the end of the quarter.

(I'm not sure how many people actually ever compiled and executed any go binaries on arm that year; we all learned Go, and it was a great class! But as far as the class, the phones were completely unnecessary. I think that they did make a more relevant class where the phones were able to be used again the year after that.)

Its branding and companies using the language with hopes of being acquired by them is already good enough.

Had Go been released at AT&T and it would have shared the same fate as Limbo.

> companies using the language with hopes of being acquired by them

This is beyond belief. What companies are using Go with the hopes of being acquired by Google? Does anyone honestly believe that Google's acquisitions teams know or care about programming languages? Any business that acquires companies on that basis is doomed to failure, as is any company that hopes to be acquired on that basis.

Well if one doesn't like something, they have to come up with part hilarious and part wild assertions like this.

as what ?

The idea here is if it worked its marketing but if it doesn't its market that has spoken.

Making it the first Google result for "go"? (Instead of the verb, or the game)

When I search "go" on google the first result I get is a package courier, then the game, then the verb... then comes Golang though.

Go has been a success as well because of that marketing machine.

Counterpoint: the Go programming language.

Did Go start as an official Google project? It always seemed like more of a side project that happened to be developed by Google engineers.

It has always been associated with Google for as long as it has been known outside of Google. :)

Which failed in its stated mission and fell back to being yet another just-ok web scripting language.

Java also has been a phenomenal success, just not as a language for applets.

Um...what? Are you thinking of Dart?

Go initially billed itself as a language for systems programming, but that claim was quickly retracted when it turned out that Go's creators had a different notion of systems programming than everyone else.

Not everyone. Just self-proclaimed authority who decided systems means operating system or some embedded code. Lots of companies I worked have title Systems Engineer or departments Systems engineering which has nothing to do with Operating systems but just some internal applications.

> Just self-proclaimed authority who decided systems means operating system or some embedded code

Systems does mean that. There are 2 broad categories of software you can write. One is software that provides a service to the user directly. That is an application. The other kind is software that provides a service to applications. That's systems software. Do you think there's something wrong with this notion? It's pretty well accepted over the decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming

Well by that definition Docker, Kubernetes, etcd and so on are systems software. But people here somehow explicitly make it to mean Computer Operating Systems.

Sure, and Go's most prolific users are in infrastructure software for distributed systems. You seem to agree with the quoted statement.

By this definition, Python and JavaScript are systems languages.

This was all over with way before the 1.0 release even happened. There's no point in arguing over something that was addressed several years ago before Go even reached stability. Plus, trying to say that Go was a "failure" because of this is absurd. It was an issue of terminology, not technology. Given Kubernetes, Docker, etc you would have to be totally delusional to claim that Go has been a failure.

30 years is a good time frame to judge a programming language.

But Google as a whole isn't working on this. A lot of the projects at Google require collaboration across multiple teams, but I could see Fuschia being done by a fairly small and cohesive team.

The last time I counted there were well over a hundred people just committing code alone.

https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open