Early on it was risky to choose go, as it really wasn’t clear if go could achieve mainstream adoption. That said, in hindsight, it really should have been obvious. If I myself saw its benefits over the incumbents, I should have realized I wasn’t the only one. That said, go is old enough that google still had a lot of its older more positive “high skilled elite cool programmer” image, so perhaps that really helped the language along. I’m not sure. Today I’d be much more hesitant to pick up a google language.
This is exactly what I was thinking about. Back then there wasn’t an anti google sentiment (or if so, it wasn’t strong) But now this sentiment would hinder a new language. Thankfully go has launched well enough that I think it can live on and shed itself of any potential negative associations some people might have.
