I think a lot of the "coolness" factor of Go comes not from its parent company, but from some of its core developers, namely Rob Pike & Ken Thompson. That gives Go a serious Bell Labs/Unix/Plan 9 pedigree.

I don't follow the mailing list anymore, so I don't know if it already led to the same "cargo cult" fanboyship that Plan 9 sometimes evokes, where a lot of the idiosyncratic opinions of its developers (e.g. "shared libraries are bad") are basically never questioned and repeated almost like holy scripture.

I tend to think of "coolness" as a kind of reason behind early adoption, more like "this thing as a large opportunity for catching on".

I'm not 100% sure would make the argument that "Rob Pike and Ken Thompson made it". Instead, I'd say "it's in use at Google, and all of these other startups..." If 1 or 2 of those startups hit it big (e.g. Twitter or LinkedIn kind of big) that might have a bit more of an "Ooo" factor.

Though I have said, "it's incredibly well thought out, look, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson know what they're doing". I don't sense this quite had the gravitas I was looking for yet. Hm.

Yes!

Pretty much anything Google does is cool. Probably same could be said about Amazon, Facebook et al.

Depends a lot on your interpretation of "Cool" though.

Right.

I get more of the sense that Google is more "impressive" than "cool".

If I were to use "Google's got it in production" I might be told something like "well they can pull this off" as if they have some unattainable smarts or something.

Whereas a "cool" thing is more about just simply taking a risk.

Come to think of it, that's kind of a funny definition. Oh well.