Whatever the legacy of Go as a language and ecosystem is, I think the influence it’s had will stand the test of time. I think because of Robert’s gofmt , it’s pretty much now accepted that most of the work of laying out your code should be done by a tool, not by a human. I think that the focus on getting a spec right and thinking about making sure you have the right features is a big deal. Forcing UTF into the language spec, doing a lot of the things we mentioned before - they have an effect. The way that we do code reviews as part of the standard process - not just pull requests, but we actually do a full review, with a nice tool suite… That kind of thing.

We’ve had conversations with other projects. We wanted to know how we do and how we accept community contributions, and sometimes they were surprised that we look at them first, rather than accept and then clean up later. It’s just an attitude thing; we wanna make sure that everything that goes into the system is the highest quality it can be. That approach is not universally-liked, but it works very well, and I think a lot of other projects have learned as well to think about the health of your project, not just the feature set and the users that you’re gonna get by adding them.

So there’s aspects of our ecosystem that are not necessarily seminal, but have some influence over the way the systems of the future will be built, whatever happens with Go.

[ ] Go is still growing as a community, and who knows how big it’ll get. As I said, I don’t think it’s gonna be the number one language ever, or even close to it. One place where it has not established much of a beachhead is education. I’d like to see it. I think it will never really become a major mainstream language until it’s taught in universities… And that pretty much hasn’t happened yet. There’s a little tiny bit of it, but not enough. And now that Python has pretty much become the de facto language for everything except systems software, I think Python is the language of the future that you should probably be talking about.