Motion seconded. As someone who's worked with more languages than I care to count, I think Go really is a great contribution. It's not just that there are big names behind it. I have little doubt that it will stand on its own merits precisely because of how its creators' experience and clarity of purpose manifest in pragmatic language design.
FWIW, I'm also really enjoying getting into Rust[1]. At a distance, it's easy to confuse their purposes: both Rust and Go are superficially "new-world systems languages". But the goals and influences of each differ considerably, and this becomes manifest as you dig into them.
[1] Caveat: Rust is definitely still in its pre-release lifecycle. As such don't expect to launch your-next-great-whatever to production with it. But it's a great time for language and software enthusiasts to jump in and have fun.
One of my biggest problems with Go is that what the authors say it is for and what people using it for are 2 different things. The authors say it is to replace systems languages, and as far as I know they've never retracted that position, whereas in the wild it's being used instead of Python and other similar scripting languages.
I think that's simply a misunderstanding of what "systems language" means. It does not mean "go write an operating system", even though that's an application that comes to mind because of C.
From the top of golang.org: "Go is an open source programming environment that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software." That's a pretty general statement. Follow on with this one from [1]: "Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language." They're pretty clear that they want to have their cake and eat it too, regarding the benefits of these language classes.
For more color on Go's origins, focus, and design, I highly recommend the "Go at Google" talk by Rob Pike, available as video [2] or an edited article version [3].
It's not a misunderstanding at all. From day one the target was C/C++. The initial demos were all about how fast Go compiles compared to C++.
Hell, that FAQ makes it pretty clear what the target is. Please read "What is the purpose of the project?" and tell me how the target is anything but C/C++...
