What's the definition of "success" here? Popularity?

As I understand it, Google's rationale for Go is to enable them to hire a lot of say, good-but-not-great fresh CS graduates with little or no practical experience and produce software at their scale without putting those new hires through a multi-year training programme.

So the definition of success is that Go makes those people productive. If you give these fresh hires C++, now everything is on fire and even experienced people sent in to extinguish the flames end up just saying evacuate the entire site and let it burn itself out because that will be cheaper than diagnosing what's wrong.

This goal means some choices Go makes which I don't like seem more respectable. For example Go specifically warns you not to get clever. This is sound advice for a 22 year old new programmer who still probably thinks "Romeo and Juliet" is about true love, but it'd be very frustrating if you were trying to squeeze the last drops of performance juice out of a system. The answer from Google's point of view is that Go is the wrong language in that case and it's time to rewrite.

Which is ironic given the whole plethora of hiring practices at Google.

Also Go is mostly used externally, Google's key projects are all based on Java and C++, even Kubernetes would have stayed in Java if it wasn't for some Go folks joining the project and pushing for a rewrite.

It is not ironic if you have ever interacted with these people. They suck at everything outside of leetcoding.

> As I understand it, Google's rationale for Go is to enable them to hire a lot of say, good-but-not-great fresh CS graduates with little or no practical experience and produce software at their scale without putting those new hires through a multi-year training programme.

From my discussions with employees at Google, the rationale for Go is to keep a large staff of promising CS graduates busy on dead-end projects (while preventing them from causing too much damage) until something takes off and they need to actually put some of that spare headcount to use.

I think so. I wish OCaml or Clojure had become popular like Go and Rust when they were the fresh thing of the day..

Something like “Optimized for software development in the real world”. Wide adoption is a consequence/indicator of this optimization, not the definition itself.