The Google backing and hype kept me away from Go for years. After being stuck with a succession of scripting languages that weren't doing it for me and being frustrated at the time it takes to be as productive in something like c, Go is really the sweet spot of readability, reliability and productivity for me. I think the Google backing may not be as advantageous as some people think. Dart did not become a popular language and would probably have died out if Flutter hadn't come along.

Yeah, Go being from Google is not necessarily a good thing. It means the language is under the control of a single company and, what's more, a company that is well-known for giving up on many of its projects.

And the open-source aspect of Go's development is managed entirely in Google services (the dev mailing list is a Google Group, you can't contribute without a Gmail address...the list is long). Sure it's hosted on GitHub, but the majority of the real conversations are elsewhere.

> frustrated at the time it takes to be as productive in something like c

Don't worry, no is productive in something like c

> After being stuck with a succession of scripting languages that weren't doing it for me

I am saddened yet also consoled everyone that likes Go comes from the scripting languages. That's such a low bar to beat!

Yeah. That's why it's about as successful as Dart.

I guess the political wars of JavaScript vs Dart, ChromiumVM and Chrome team dropping Dart on the floor, causing the departure of the original design team, kind of helped to Dart's success.

The political wars at Google with Dart are quite visible from outside, with Fuchsia picking up Flutter, and strangely the future of Android UI looks pretty much like Flutter, after too many times asking Android team about what was their opinion on Flutter for Android development at IO Fireside, meanwhile the developers' survey has had questions about how much we cared to see it supported on Kotlin multi-platform.

So yeah, had Chrome decided to push Chromium VM no matter what, Dart would be as successful as Go by now, after all younger generations don't seem to have any problem being Chrome developers.

Dart is an example of what happens to a language when corporate support is taken away. People lose confidence in the language.

Right. Programing languages by advertising companies have high adoption rate.

You're saying that as if it's not true

How many languages are there released by advertising companies?

Just to show the influence, python was an obscure programming language until Google started using it.

Actually no, Zope was quite famous during the first .com wave.

But Python has had many interesting sponsors throughout the years, not only Google.

A good example lies in Kotlin, as well.

Well, dev-oriented projects by Google and Facebook fair well...

I would think that would be a knock against it with the reputation of Google abandoning projects.