JavaScript is an interesting case, in that it was the only way to write code that would run in Netscape Navigator at the time. In a sense it had Netscape behind it, and then it had Microsoft behind it once they reverse-engineered an implementation for IE3.

I'm not very familiar with the history of Python, though it seems it was funded in its early years by various research institutes that employed Guido van Rossum, rather than a giant corporation.

It certainly is in the last decade or so. Python is a language from the early nineties and took decades to achieve it's current level of popularity.

Javascript was backed by Netscape, and later by Microsoft/IE. It would never have succeeded without corporate backing and being on of the 2.5 usable languages on the web (Java was the other one, I'm counting ActiveX/VBScript as half)

Javascript was Netscape, and adopted by various other megacorps (such ad Microsoft and ... Google) over the years in various guises.

Wasn't it Google that heavily used Python that popularized it a lot?

And JS was born and evolved with the browser.

Python was picked up by companies like Red Hat at the end of the nineties (e.g. in the Anaconda installer). So in Linux circles Python had already gained quite a bit of popularity.

... Python was led by a Google employee for seven years.

It would be more correct to say Google hired the leader of Python and he worked there for 7 years

Is there really much practical difference between that and Go? From the Ian Lance Taylor response:

> There was no mandate or suggestion from Google management or executives that Google should develop a programming language. For many years, including well after the open source release, I doubt any Google executives had more than a vague awareness of the existence of Go

One of the first languages supported on App Engine was Python, IIRC.

Does it matter where the person worked? Python definitely was not Google’s or any other corp’s.

Google employed the primary maintainer of Python and paid him to work on it. You asked "did they have a giant corp behind them", the subtext there being that you could complete the sentence "as Go does". I'm merely pointing out that your example of Python is strikingly similar to Guido Van Rossum working at Google while he was BDFL of Python

Of course it matters. That's the whole reason the Go Is Google's Language post exists. And the whole reason the response exists, and this very comment thread, too.

Absolutely not. It is one thing to create a language and maontain it and another to hire someone who created a language some years ago.

from the post:

> There was no mandate or suggestion from Google management or executives that Google should develop a programming language. For many years, including well after the open source release, I doubt any Google executives had more than a vague awareness of the existence of Go

That is a ver very strong assumption. Just because Google did not explicitly have a ‘GO’ team does not mean they did not support it. I assume Google became aware of it the moment their employees started using it for something useful. People have bosses who have bosses. At whoch point they decided to let their employees continue working on it.

Go exists because Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and others are allowed the latitude to make it.

You can be sure that whatever they do gets a high profile without it in any way being "supported" or "official"