"We returned to our offices after the talk. I started another compilation, turned my chair around to face Robert, and started asking pointed questions. Before the compilation was done, we'd roped Ken in and had decided to do something." http://commandcenter.blogspot.de/2012/06/less-is-exponential...

"Began as a 20% project" http://talks.golang.org/2012/go1.slide#5

I have no reason to assume that they are lying.

Great info guys, thanks for sharing.

>How do you know that is the case?

Because they have described it themselves (the Go guys). From the language FAQ:

"Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson started sketching the goals for a new language on the white board on September 21, 2007. Within a few days the goals had settled into a plan to do something and a fair idea of what it would be. Design continued part-time in parallel with unrelated work. By January 2008, Ken had started work on a compiler with which to explore ideas; it generated C code as its output. By mid-year the language had become a full-time project and had settled enough to attempt a production compiler."

>I don't know the Google executive plans but it seems like to get Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson together to create a language might have/need some executive level involvement.

The agreement to let them work on it by some exec, is different than Google deciding "we need a new language, you guys go build one that fixes our pain points, and we will migrate stuff to that".

V8 or Dart for example are cases of this. Google decided the need to have those created, spend money on marketing and getting top people to work on them, built full-on documentation, marketing material, benchmarks, tools and sites for them, etc. It's the same kind of focus MS had for .NET and SUN had for Java.

Whereas Go is more like how Google had a team work on Unladen Swallow, or Apple had MacRuby, etc, mostly peripheral stuff, like a 20% project that grew up.