As an aside, Go is also "a Java" in the same sense that Clojure is a lisp (similar syntax and concepts, same level of abstraction, same philosophy). In fact, Google seems to be turning out many of these "Javas" lately (Android, Go, Dart).
While Java and its variants' appeal at most large organizations is considered by some a sign of their conservatism, Google is anything but when it comes to picking the best tools. Google's fondness of Java is evidence of the merits of the Java philosophy when it comes to maintaining large codebases by large teams.
Creating a language that follows this philosophy while still boosting productivity (and maybe providing other benefits as well) is an interesting challenge. I think Go falls short. Kotlin looks interesting.
I always thought the Java love at Google came from needing speed more than a startup -- they automatically will get factors of ten more users directly for most everything they do. (Edit: Point is, "Java-like" is Google's optimum for other reasons than being conservative.)
Sure, performance is a big requirement for them, but there are other languages with good performance and better expressivity (like Haskell and Scala), yet they are not used at Google, and Google's new languages did not adopt their philosophies.
Google uses Java because they were able to pick up a lot of really skilled Java developers during the 2001-2004 recession, and those devs built many of the products that were introduced in 2004-2007. Once a product's been built and adopted by the marketplace it's very difficult to change the implementation language.
Most of the devs who were hired at Google from 1999 - 2002 still prefer C++, and products built in that era (Search and much of the infrastructure) are still in C++. In general rewrites from C++ -> Java have not gone well; I know at least one such frontend that was rewritten back in C++ a year later.
I'm not sure I get your point. Are you saying that Google's new programming languages adopt the Java philosophy because of developers they hired over ten years ago? Also, I'm not sure I understood what you were trying to say about C++ at Google.
I think his point is that the choice of language at google isn't exactly a managerial or strategic decision. They just happen to have a lot of java devs (probably at senior positions now, since they were hired a long time ago).Even if they have gone out, if most of your stuff is made in a language, it would be really difficult for new comers to shift that paradigm to some other language.
The part about C++ was to describe a similar scene. When they had mostly C++ devs, their language of choice was C++. and now they have mostly java devs, so java it is!
While Java and its variants' appeal at most large organizations is considered by some a sign of their conservatism, Google is anything but when it comes to picking the best tools. Google's fondness of Java is evidence of the merits of the Java philosophy when it comes to maintaining large codebases by large teams.
Creating a language that follows this philosophy while still boosting productivity (and maybe providing other benefits as well) is an interesting challenge. I think Go falls short. Kotlin looks interesting.