The pedigree of its authors and the backing of Google goes a very long way in explaining its ability to gain some modest level of popularity.
If Facebook, Tencent or even Microsoft were to create and publicize a new programming language written by industry luminaries, it too would likely crack the top 30 languages in terms of popularity.
It was also one of the first "new" languages coming out that had backing of a big company.
This broke the "We MUST use only one of the top 5 languages or else" taboo which then allowed things to proliferate.
Go showcases many of the mistakes of the first mover.
Although, to be fair, they aren't all necessarily mistakes. Go has as an OVERRIDING design constraint to be able to compile, very quickly, an absolutely enormous, disjoint codebase. And, it's not clear that any of the other languages can do that.
I, in my personal use of programming languages, don't care about that particular design constraint, so I'm not willing to give up other things in a programming language in service of that particular goal.
Why the "would" there? Microsoft did it, twice; and it did become one of the top 5, twice. (Oh, well, in fact it was three times, but the first time they were small.)
None of those two were the best language available, although C# isn't bad by any measure.
Comments
The pedigree of its authors and the backing of Google goes a very long way in explaining its ability to gain some modest level of popularity.
If Facebook, Tencent or even Microsoft were to create and publicize a new programming language written by industry luminaries, it too would likely crack the top 30 languages in terms of popularity.
It was also one of the first "new" languages coming out that had backing of a big company.
This broke the "We MUST use only one of the top 5 languages or else" taboo which then allowed things to proliferate.
Go showcases many of the mistakes of the first mover.
Although, to be fair, they aren't all necessarily mistakes. Go has as an OVERRIDING design constraint to be able to compile, very quickly, an absolutely enormous, disjoint codebase. And, it's not clear that any of the other languages can do that.
I, in my personal use of programming languages, don't care about that particular design constraint, so I'm not willing to give up other things in a programming language in service of that particular goal.
Why the "would" there? Microsoft did it, twice; and it did become one of the top 5, twice. (Oh, well, in fact it was three times, but the first time they were small.)
None of those two were the best language available, although C# isn't bad by any measure.
You mean like Facebook's Hack language?