It will tend to make a dent one program at a time - like etcd, docker, nsq. Soon, a significant fraction of your installables will have to be compiled with Go.
> It will tend to make a dent one program at a time - like etcd, docker, nsq. Soon, a significant fraction of your installables will have to be compiled with Go.
Only if commercial UNIX and Windows also get rewritten in Go.
> This was reason enough for C to get popular.
C got popular because UNIX was adopted by the enterprise and C was the system language.
(Don't know why I can't reply to the leaf nodes in the conversation...)
>What was taking its place at that time?
Pascal was fairly heavily used, but was dying out. LISP was hot because it was the middle of the Great AI Boom, Modula-2 was supposed to replace Pascal and be a systems programming language, and ADA was supposed to be the next great thing. Apple had created Object Pascal. Self was the big research language. Nothing really took hold until C++ in the latter part of the 1980s.
I might be off, but I think C still would have been popular. It's such a simple language, very easy to learn, easy to reason about, close to the machine but provides enough abstraction to easily write complicated code. C's merits as a language are self-evident beyond its usage in Unix. Of course, some other language with this set of properties might have taken C's role if it had not been for unix, so maybe that's what you meant.
> It's such a simple language, very easy to learn...
Mhm.
> ... easy to reason about...
So very much no. There is nothing about the stateful nature of C-programming, its syntax or the patterns people use that is easy to reason about. You're comparing it to what, exactly? C++? C is an amazing language but comparing it to the languages that were around when it became popular it's not even close to relatively easy to reason about. Even less so nowadays.
> provides enough abstraction to easily write complicated code
This strikes me as a weird thing to list in "pros". Complicated is the opposite of good. Abstractions should let you write simple code, not complicated code. I feel like you've either misunderstood the word "complicated", massively mischaracterized C or you have a very weird view on abstraction.
> Of course, some other language with this set of properties might have taken C's role if it had not been for unix, so maybe that's what you meant.
I'd like to point out that your assumption that people use programming languages because they are better than the alternatives is pretty naive. The most popular languages are decent, no doubt, but have you noticed how every really good language suffers from a pretty huge lack of users? We all know these languages are better, but it's never been an issue of "You're not good enough for people to use you".
If there was ever any indicator for a good language it'd be "What do people choose when they have the freedom, knowledge and opportunity to choose anything without any outside influence?". That scenario is so wildly scarce to observe and anyone who is in that situation likely suffers from biases acquired earlier on his programming journey.
I honestly think it will. Especially for high-performance applications it's going to start making serious inroads. Financial and scientific applications will start the trend and once some infrastructure and best practices get established, it will start seeping into the mainstream. Having a big name like Google behind it is a lot more assuring to businesses than hacker-driven projects like nodejs or academic-driven ones like Scala. Go is built for industry.
