Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or <i>someone</i> it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had made Go, no one would be using it right now. Network effects matter in languages. People want all the upsides of the network effects (i.e. the ecosystem and adoption), but none of the downsides (it's propped up by a big company with massive network effects).