@robpike That's a great essay, Rob.

I was at Microsoft when Go was announced, and I remember being confused about the goals as I understood them ("fast builds"--though I should not have been, given that a Windows dev build took, like, days).

When I eventually moved to Google and eventually learned Go, it became clear to me that the goals were, as you write, not about language nerdery but about how we build things, usually very big and complex things, for groups of "we" that are quite large.

Kudos to you and everyone else for spotting the opportunity and changing the way so many of the rest of us think about development!