Leaving Google – Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

DRANK

I’ve left Google after working there for 19 years.For most of that time I’ve been fortunate in being able to work on the Go programming language. Go was started by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and Robert Griesemer in the fall of 2007. I joined the team in June, 2008, about the same time as Russ Cox. I’ve been very lucky to be able to work with such remarkable people on such an interesting project.I am astonished at how much use Go has gotten over the years. Go has reached the status of being just another programming language, one that any programmer can choose when appropriate. That is far beyond what any of us expected in the early days, when our best hope was that Go might serve as an example for useful ideas that other languages and programming environments could adopt.I started on Go by adding a Go frontend to the GCC compiler. The Go project already had a compiler, of course, based on the Inferno C compiler. Having two compilers helped ensure that the language was clearly defined. …