Go language history

2019-01-01
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Every language is spawned from the need to solve a problem or scratch an itch if you will. Learn the history to set the correct expectations on a language.

The people


Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson are the original authors of the Go language which is currently supervised by Russ Cox.

The story

  1960       1970          1980          1990        2000      2007-2009

                                                +- Javascript  --+
                                               /                  \
                +----- C -----------------+---+ PHP/Perl        ---+
               /                           \                        \
- Algol ------+                             +-- Java             ----+- Go
               \                                                    /
                \       +--- Modula ---+-- Python               -- +
                 \     /                                          /
                  +---+----------+         o-- Ada 95            /
                  |               \                             /
              Pascal               +----                    ---+
                                 Oberon
Development started in 2007 to shorten compile times and bring the positive experiences with other languages into one language to solve problems in highly distributed computing environments at Google.
It was influenced by many languages and a lot of it's concurrency idioms and terms are from Tony Hoares Communicating Sequential Processes. The Go language is now a community driven effort at github.com/golang/go.