That was 10 years after it’s initial release and the spec hadn’t much changed from the specification defined by those Bell Labs employees. It wasn’t until 2011 that C++ saw some significant changes through the community. And in the first 10 years I seem to recall it was plagued by proprietary compilers having their own subtle behaviours.
I’m not saying it was all terrible nor that Go is managed better. But whenever there is a conversation about Go on HN people get so caught up in their own snobbery about how terrible they perceive Go to be that they lose all touch with reality.
The fact remains a language backed by a company is far less likely to die into insignificance than a language that isn’t. This is because it takes a lot for a language to gain momentum. You have a bit of a chicken and egg problem where developers won’t use a language without a good ecosystem, frameworks and community. But people aren’t going to write that if there aren’t already developers using it. This is where corporate sponsorship really helps.
Thankfully there are a plethora of good languages out there you can choose from. If you don’t like the direction of one language then you can use another. Or, alternatively, since Java, C# and Go all have open source compilers, you could fork and build your own community.
