Go might be nice and all, but I could probably never in good conscience use it seriously, for one simple reason: It’s dominated by Google. It was started by Google, and all of its core development (I assume) is done by Google people, with Google’s blessing. It’s even named for the company, making the ownership transparent and obvious to all.
With something like C, C++, Lisp, Python or the like, you know that even if some large company abandons it, it probably won’t even make the headlines, since it won’t matter much for the rest of the users of the language – it has a large enough user base that the language will be fine.
But what if the controlling company decided to abandon Dart, Swift, C#, Go, etc.? It would kill the language in an instant. Or if they decided to simply take the language in a new direction more suited to the company but contrary to the wishes of its global user base? I can’t work under those conditions, and neither should anyone else accept to do so.
To clarify: If, say, at least two thirds majority of the development of the language was no longer done by a controlling company (and if the supposedly non-affiliated developers were not also all incidentally employed by the same company), and, in the case of Go, the name was changed, I would probably not have a problem with using any of the aforementioned languages.
P.S.
Rust is a slightly special case, since it’s dominated not by a company, but by the Mozilla Foundation, making it slightly more dependable than an arbitrary company.
>Go might be nice and all, but I could probably never in good conscience use it seriously, for one simple reason: It’s dominated by Google. It was started by Google, and all of its core development (I assume) is done by Google people, with Google’s blessing.
I don't think Google is particularly the problem here. Go has lots of people working on and with it from outside Google.
The problem is that the core team is very resistant to any kind of outside ideas (while not being always brilliant with their ideas to compensate) -- and the community has fossilised to those loving the same ideas as well. It encourages a groupthink that's not there in other languages.
Contrast with e.g. Swift, which while run by Apple, has a great community participation story (to the point to going into too much bikeshedding).
A significant part of it is that there's a disconnect between a bunch of the core team, and the rest of the world, because even said fossilized group of the community often has no idea about certain Go fundamentals (like that significant portion of the runtime is copy-paste rewrite of certain C libraries, libs that even were part of the runtime before the rewrite, and that Go is verily not unix/posix native language).