alt Hacker News> No they weren't, in fact they were very surprised by the adoption from Python folks
I'm kind of surprised that the Go creators were surprised by this.
Like I know they didn't like C++, but Go is by no means a replacement for C++ despite whatever was said about "building a better C++/Java".
It took so long to pick up generics that Rust was already around and the logical next step for C++ developers by the time that happened. And that's only scratching the surface of why people choose C++.
On the other hand, having a more performant "simple" language that directly supports concurrency and lets you compile to native code without a ton of ceremony could be very helpful indeed if you're a Python dev who need to take an app to the next level without having to learn intricacies of C FFI or the GIL.
Why wouldn't they be surprised? Python users were already using Python, so presumably it already solved their problems and they wouldn't benefit from another Python. Through Google's eyes, anyone who needed performance would have already long abandoned Python for C++.
What Googlers don't have a grasp of is how resource constrained most other businesses are. They cannot afford to hire C++ experts and were using Python because Python developers were the only developers they could get their hands on, even where Python wasn't providing sufficient performance.