I think the notable exception to that rule is Go.

Go is imported by Google, not exported by them.

It's also got good funding, a large number of well known core team members (who won't let it die) and a good license which protects the users in the future.

Could you explain the "imported" comment? (I don't know much about the history of Go, and it looks a lot like Google is exporting it.)

Google don't really prescribe what happens with Go from what I can see. It's left up to the Go team who's focus is to produce a general purpose language and the community who want a stable product that fills their needs as well. Google take the stable release and use it internally. Therefore Google import it from the community project.

Some other notable organisations develop everything internally and then release it to the public i.e. they export it. For example C#.

> who's focus is to produce a general purpose language

More a "solve Google's specific problems" language, general Google purpose

Um, nope? What exactly is google-specific about it? Nothing from what I can tell. It's as general-purpose as C or Python or JS etc etc. In fact, it's basically C, slightly redesigned from scatch for this decade rather than the one 30 years ago...

It's not dictated by Google management, but it's definitely directed by Pike et al to address the concerns of companies developing software at Google's massive scale.

As an example, C++ and Java programs at Google were taking more than half an hour to compile. This is why Go's semantics were chosen with speed-of-compilation in mind:

* Strictly acyclic module hierarchies (greatly simplifies compile-time name resolution)

* No generics (specialization has a compile-time cost)

* Unused imports are a fatal compilation error (to avoid having to parse unnecessary files)

All three of these decisions are somewhat contentious; Pike admits as much in many of his talks. But they were chosen because of the challenges of writing software at Google's scale. It is in this roundabout way that Go "belongs" to Google, in the sense that it addresses problems that Google has and prioritizes the best solutions to those problems, whether or not those solutions are at odds with the needs of non-Google users.

I see Go basically as Google's kind (duck typing, garbage collection, faster, no Global Interpreter Lock) migration offer to their Python Coders to get rid of hampered (for Google scale) Python, some kind of Python++. If some C++ coders want to migrate also (shorter compile times, better dependency management (no messy include files)), they are welcome.

I agree about Microsoft's heavy-handedness. Interestingly, the C# language up to version 3.0 is ISO standard (SO/IEC 23270:2006).

>I can see this first hand with Objective-C, where Apple evolves the language as they see fit. The joining of such different paradigms as Smalltalk-style OO and C was fragile in the first place and can barely sustain the new functionality.

Huh? Cocoa (and the rest of Obj-C libraries Apple does) are just fine, hardly "barely sustained" by the language.

And it wasn't even Apple, the core framework logic is mostly the same as in NeXT era Objective-C (minus some welcomed syntactic sugar additions).

Smalltalk-style OO and C are very well married in Objective-C, and the language has been, historically, a joy to work with. Jusk ask Tim Berners Lee and Carmack.

Even today it gives strengths that other platforms lack, namely the ability to have very dynamic high level abstractions and easily drop to C whenever you want, which for desktop and especially mobile use is very nice: better memory management and no GC pauses, while still having a full blown OO GUI framework.