That thread mentions:

Homage, Easter egg, inside joke, take your pick :). Notice the authors of the commits in question too

Said thread references this commit as the starting point, but also points out to the actual first commit of the Golang project, with the first revision of the Go spec.

The (alleged) "author" of the four first commits is Brian Kernighan.

Rob Pike has worked with Brian in the 1980's, at Bell Labs, so this can be viewed as a reference to his professional origin.

The idea of this Easter egg is to illustrate an evolution of an Hello World program in C:

(See more with this recent GopherCon April 2014 talk hellogophers.slide - Rob Pike)

Hello, World

hg log -r 0:4 changeset: 0:f6182e5abf5e user: Brian Kernighan <bwk> date: Tue Jul 18 19:05:45 1972 -0500 summary: hello, world $ hg update -r 0 $ cat src/pkg/debug/macho/testdata/hello.b main( ) { extrn a, b, c; putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n'); } a 'hell'; b 'o, w'; c 'orld';

Convert to C

changeset: 1:b66d0bf8da3e user: Brian Kernighan <bwk> date: Sun Jan 20 01:02:03 1974 -0400 summary: convert to C $ hg update -r 1 $ cat src/pkg/debug/macho/testdata/hello.c main() { printf("hello, world"); }

Convert to Draft-Proposed ANSI C

changeset: 2:ac3363d7e788 user: Brian Kernighan <research!bwk> date: Fri Apr 01 02:02:04 1988 -0500 summary: convert to Draft-Proposed ANSI C $ hg update -r 2 $ cat src/pkg/debug/macho/testdata/hello.c #include <stdio.h> main() { printf("hello, world

"); }

Last-minute fix: convert to ANSI C

changeset: 3:172d32922e72 user: Brian Kernighan <bwk@research.att.com> date: Fri Apr 01 02:03:04 1988 -0500 summary: last-minute fix: convert to ANSI C $ hg update -r 3 cat src/pkg/debug/macho/testdata/hello.c #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("hello, world

"); return 0; }

Go spec starting point