alt Hacker NewsNope, it was designed by one Oberon, and two UNIX heads, disgruntled to be faced with C++ at their work, they happened to be working at Google, and got support from their managers for developing it further.
Thanks to Docker pivoting from Python into Go, and Kubernetes from Java into Go, while it was still pre-1.0, it managed to take off, and has more users outside Google than at Google itself, where Java, Kotlin, C++, Python still dominate most projects outside Kubernetes ecosystem.
There is a certain irony that Google would need a language like Go, given their hiring process.
Go it's just condensed Plan9 C philosophy (and Limbo/Alef) for legacy Unix users. If we ditched Unix in the 90's being Inferno and Plan9 under a libre licenses GNU would be running Emacs under an Inferno kernel.
Also, proper namespaces from the start, Unicode, 9p even under Emacs and who knows what. Oh, and fore sure far less exploits, and with no Kubernetes or Docker nonsense. Half of VC's would be bankrupt today because damn namespaces would do the 90% of today's backends seamlessly.
And maybe we would be using some Inferno based smartphone with custom UI's and programming in Limbo for that. Oh, and batteries lasting a week for sure.