You attribute too much to these entities called "Google" and "Mozilla". They're made of people.
No executive asks for a new programming language. However at some enlightened organizations, they are willing to let hackers explore radical approaches.
At some point, in order for them to become "official" projects, the hackers have to align the language with the organization's goals. But the imprimatur of their creators is unmistakable.
In any case, I doubt there is any plan to move everything in Google to Go. They're willing to let the creators and some enthusiasts play around with it, maybe deploy a few apps internally. But for Rust to be a success, Mozilla's going to have to use it extensively in their main product.
Hm, you're right. There's also the scripting languages in Office, which were definitely management-driven. They share something with JavaScript - a strategy to differentiate an already dominant platform from competitors.
That said, managers usually have little say in defining what the actual language is going to be like or what its other applications will be, because so much has to be deferred to the language designers. Even though Netscape's execs specifically requested a Java-like language, they got something rather different.
Yeah, I admit my comment was not all that well thought out.
I was reacting to the usual dumbass theory that $BIG_ORGANIZATION is executing some master plan which explains all of their actions. It explains how they filter and rank ideas, but it doesn't explain why those particular ideas happened to be floating around in their organization.
When it comes to things like new frameworks and languages, in my experience, it's usually some employee going off on their own. And the reason why the language is the way it is has more to do with that person's obsessions and interests. They later justify it to the organization by producing results and getting peer buy-in. FLOW-MATIC (ancestor of COBOL), Perl, Java, Sawzall, Go, and Rust seem to be like this.
The other pattern is when companies intentionally make a language to compete, or lock-in a developer platform. Now this move really is predictable, and any MBA can draw you a 2x2 matrix showing why Microsoft had to create C#. Likewise VB, PowerShell, F#, and JavaScript. It doesn't mean they are bad languages. But they are often platform specific since their whole purpose is to corral developers into one camp.
I don't think Haskell counts at all. That was an academic project amalgamating other academic projects.
I don't know enough about the others you mention. Maybe this isn't a useful way to think about programming languages, but I was just exploring the idea by rambling about it. ;)
Objective-C was developed mostly by one guy (Brad Cox) back in the '80s. He was inspired by Smalltalk. He didn't do it on behalf of any corporation that I know of, though he and a partner did try to commercialize it later.
No executive asks for a new programming language. However at some enlightened organizations, they are willing to let hackers explore radical approaches.
At some point, in order for them to become "official" projects, the hackers have to align the language with the organization's goals. But the imprimatur of their creators is unmistakable.
In any case, I doubt there is any plan to move everything in Google to Go. They're willing to let the creators and some enthusiasts play around with it, maybe deploy a few apps internally. But for Rust to be a success, Mozilla's going to have to use it extensively in their main product.