[erlang-questions] Go vs Erlang for distribution

zxq9 zxq9@REDACTED
Mon Jun 23 16:52:11 CEST 2014


On Monday 23 June 2014 16:34:15 Alexei Sholik wrote:

> One little nitpick I have is about zxq9's first reply which mentions:
> 
> Google is a huge company that is spending a *lot* of effort in an attempt to
> > prevent yet another of their expensive toys winding up in the rubbish bin
> > of
> > digital history.
> 
> I have been following the Go community (not too closely) since 2012 and I
> haven't seen any indications of Google pouring monetary or marketing
> resources into promoting Go. Obviously, it has been paying salaries to the
> core team (of some ~5-8 members), but apart from that, unless it is also
> paying blog authors and companies to adopt Go, it is fair to say that most
> of the praise Go is continuously receiving comes from the word-of-mouth and
> talks given by its authors.
> 
> TL;DR: there is no massive campaign carried out by Google to promote Go
> like Sun did with Java or MS with C#. This is already offtopic, but I feel
> I had to point that out.

I'd like to point out that Google doesn't have to carry out a massive 
campaign; they control your search results.

I just opened a sterile environment each in Japan, one in the US and one in 
France to test this out. A search for "Go" on any Google property points me to 
Go language resources -- videos, tutorials, conference notes, blogs, etc. -- 
pages of them, before anything else in most cases and most variants of the 
search (even when I'm trying to be specific that I want the verb, like "go 
definition").

The same search on ixquick, Bing, Goo, and DuckDuckGo turn up links to 
Disney's online property (go.com), the traditional game of Go on Wikipedia, a 
Japanese pop group, verb definitions on two dictionaries, some ESPN sports 
page, a 1999 movie called "Go" and any number of other things, but Go the 
language is nowhere to be found.

And you're telling me there isn't an absolutely massive publicity campaign 
going on? Just because Google is in a unique position to make this both cost 
almost nothing and require almost no effort doesn't mean the effort isn't 
significant and targetted.

-Craig



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