Good historical perspective thanks for it. Your comments on scientific computing/HPC are interesting. Golang could indeed have solved the two-language problem and taken off like a rocket in comparison to where it is (hovering in the top 15). However, I think it would have to tackle some very orthogonal concepts - to the systems language creators like Rob and others on the go team - like vectorization as first class concept, parallelism (not green threads) etc. which might have limited some of the initial implementation efficiencies, not sure. There is still room for such a language (Julia is getting there...) perhaps some disgruntled FORTRAN elder who is sick of C++ will create such a new language :-)