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Comment by munmaek | Hacker News Reader

You should use a language based on how well it performs for your problem and domain, and the community around it. Not based on one article or because google is maintaining it.

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I think his fear of google's stewardship of the language is the fear of what it'll do to the community around it.

Its incredibly unlikely that Google would take decisions for the language that would make it less effective at what it does.

No, but it's very likely that they'll make decisions that'll alienate the community and thereby cause it's ecosystem to lose more and more relevance. It has done that with other open source projects they stewarded.

If they alienate the community, the community can fork it, right?

In practice it's hard to fork out from the main contributers and keep the branch alive without resources on par with the main branch.

Then you rather do some new language.

Only if there are major contributing developers who do not work for Google. Is that the case with Go?

If there are no major non-Google contributors to Go, then the fork may not be successful due to lack of familiarity with the code base.

It depends on what you mean by "the community". If it's a community of contributors, and Google pulls it into a direction the contributors don't want, then they can fork it and continue contributing to it. If it's a community of users, then they have no choice but to follow whatever the contributors decide. I agree you need to have major contributors on board with a fork.

There's more nuance to it though. Users eventually become contributors (at least some percentage are), they become and stay contributors when they feel heard and feel like they have the ability to influence development. That's what nurturing an open source community means. If you start alienating your non-core contributors they'll stop contributing, if you nurture and support your non-core contributors they might become core contributors. No body wants to work voluntarily on a project they can't influence - that's not a contributor, that's an employee.

Empirically speaking, how did they do with dart?

It seems you misunderstood my post, like some others in this thread. I did not decide against Go because of the linked article, but rather because I have the same view on the language that is outlined in the article. I have a big problem with Google. And the fact that Google practically own Go is a red flag for me.

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