No, it doesn't. Go is popular because of the names and organization behind it, as well as the fact that it's useful for a lot of people despite the lack of generics.
Certainly, a lot of people are attracted to Rob Pike's rather idiosyncratic preferences, tastes, and nostalgia for the early days of Unix, which are on display in a lot of Go's design decisions, like the lack of generics. But lots of random people have preferences and nostalgia for all sorts of things; we usually only pay attention to such things when it's a person with a famous pedigree who has them.
The "names and organization behind it" thing is needlessly condescending (not to mention false), and the ability to get things done without generics basically restates David's point.
Was there something in this paper that you felt unfairly treated Rust, the language you represent on these threads? Because otherwise, I can't see what would motivate you to join this thread to snipe.
I'm with David, for what it's worth. Lack of generics has mostly helped me be productive in Go, and the extreme prevalence of generics in every Rust library I deal with has definitely slowed me down a bit. I'm looking forward to generics support in Go, but mostly for what I hope it does to message board threads.
I went out of my way to make the point without condescension. Evidently I didn't succeed, and I'm sorry for that!
Let me put it another way: Virtually all languages that have become popular recently have done so because of the backing of some large organization or another. There was a time when languages like Perl, Python, and PHP could arise out of basically nowhere and become popular. That time is gone, and now languages essentially need organizational backing of some kind to succeed. That was true for TypeScript, it was true for Rust, it was true for Swift, it was true for Kotlin, and it was true for Go. They also benefit from some sort of well-known thought leader, a role that Rob Pike plays well. If you think Go would have gotten popular without having a Google and a Rob Pike behind it, then, well, I don't know what to tell you. I don't think Rust would have been popular either without the Mozilla association.
Or, more succinctly: I see no world in which Go having simple ML-style generics, without typeclasses or functors, would have made it any less popular. Other factors dominate when it comes to success of a programming language. TypeScript, in fact, shows that you can have generics that are more complex than those of Rust and still become wildly popular.
After a week (my first week, to be fair) of hacking on a serious Rust codebase, I'll give you one reason lack of generics might have been a marketing win for Go: I have never appreciated Go's compiler speed more than I do now.
But the bigger problem is just that Rust programmers use generics absolutely everywhere (my early impression is you basically can't avoid it, because of lifetimes), and it simply does make everything harder to understand. I know I'm going to be told that if I buckle down all of this stuff will make sense and I'll be fluent with it, and sure, I managed to grok Alexandrescu C++, too. But adding new layers of indirection everywhere just has to impede comprehension; that's always the tradeoff for parameterizing and indirecting!
The flip side of this is, I've built some fairly serious things in Go --- a compiler, a couple emulators, a disassembler, a symbolic evaluator; not just the server stuff Go is supposed to be good at --- and I have complaints about Go, but almost none of them are its lack of generics.
(There are things I like about Rust! But this isn't the thread for it.)
Rereading that comment I do think I was being uncharitable and have removed it.
Reading the esbuild discussion at the time, it definitely read to me as "our language is definitely faster and if you're not getting the same performance you're holding it wrong", but looking at it now I can see how it wouldn't be intended that way.
Regardless, sorry; I think I was projecting some frustrations with the wider RESF on to you.
A lot of us Go developers would probably say we like Go because "Go is useful" and leave off the rest.
You are right, Go got more initial momentum because it came out of google and had Rob and Ken's names attached to it. But the useful part is why people actually use it.
> Go is popular because of the names and organization behind it
I hear this a lot, but the counterexample is always Dart. Google is behind it, and Lars Bak is definitely not a nobody, yet the language struggled to gain momentum; not until Flutter came on the scene, and it wasn't an official Google project when it started.
Lars gave a talk last year and said the intent was to put dart vm in chrome, then the whole mobile thing happen and there was no room for extra stuff in chrome.
https://youtu.be/mPna6D21Eqg?t=480
Certainly, a lot of people are attracted to Rob Pike's rather idiosyncratic preferences, tastes, and nostalgia for the early days of Unix, which are on display in a lot of Go's design decisions, like the lack of generics. But lots of random people have preferences and nostalgia for all sorts of things; we usually only pay attention to such things when it's a person with a famous pedigree who has them.