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The "Backed by Google" is an under-appreciated social piece of the puzzle. It's not just that Go has institutional backing, it's that googlers produce a lot of startups, and they bring their favorite things with them, and quite often one of those things is Go.

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That's why we all use Dart today.

Dart created a lot of interest at the time. The main reason it didn't take off was that Google couldn't convince MS or Mozilla to embed the DartVM in the browser.

Golang obviously didn't have that constraint, it didn't depend on any external runtime.

After the browser rebuff Google had a meandering approach to figuring out where Dart could fit in instead. Whereas Go slotted quite easily into one specific niche, building microservices at Google.

I think the lesson is that clear positioning is crucial

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