The history of Go

Go often feels very similar to C like languages. Its authors Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson wanted to fix the issues Google was suffering with languages like C++, Java and Python. It was designed to be easy to debug and fast to write, compile, and run. It was started in 2007, and some of its major contributors' backgrounds are evident in the language.

  • Brad Fitzpatrick - Creator of LiveJournal and lots of popular open-source software including memcached, PubSubHubbub, OpenID, and Perkeep.

  • Ian Lance Taylor - Contributor to GCC since 2010. Maintained GNU Binutils from 1996 to 1999.

  • Keith Randall - Researcher from MIT and Compaq's System Research Center focusing on high-performance computing.

  • Ken Thompson - Worked at Bell Labs, basically invented Unix and Regular Expressions.

  • Marcel van Lohuizen - Worked on Google's Search and Borg distributed systems.

  • Rob Pike - Invented UTF-8, wrote the first graphical interface for Unix and is one of the creators of Plan9.

  • Robert Griesemer - Worked on Java's virtual machine, Google's V8 and Sawzall languages.

  • Russ Cox - Worked at Bell Labs, contributed to Plan9.

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