It seems to me that they are, in fact, using "statically-typed, compiled system language[s] for their scripting efforts" - that is in fact what people are doing with server-side Java, Scala and C#, not to mention Java/Dalvik and Objective-C on mobile platforms.

Perhaps this article misses the point a bit. For several decades we have been using scripting languages to glue together sharp pointy C[++] tools (sh/Perl/Python/Ruby approach) or to puppetize monolithic C[++] hulks from within (VB/elisp approach).

More recent practice, on both mobile and server platforms, has been to abstract away from C[++] with a middle layer of memory-managed, compiled C-ish goop - JVM, .Net, Objective-C, whatever. This is the level where people are doing everything from amazing high-availability big data things to amazing little bleep-bloop handheld things. I think the answer to "what's the state of low-level systems programming?" is "not much is going on, but damn, there's a lot of fresh stuff happening in mid-level systems programming."

Go and Rust are late entrants to this party, and probably exist more as a hedge against Oracle litigating Java/JVM into the ground than anything else.

>I think Go has been fairly successful at Google in terms of improved code maintainability, and as an alternative to not just C but C++.

Google at large barely uses the language. All the examples they've given are of peripheral stuff, like a load balancer for MySQl for YouTube and an even simpler replacement for an aged and cranky C++ system for Google Downloads. Nothing to write home about, and no replacing C++/Java for core systems at all.