The social landscape doesn't depend on anyone actually using it. However, 1.0 isn't a significant milestone like you suggest either. For a current example, Zig is relatively popular today despite not yet reaching 1.0.

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stouset 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you just forget the things you write in earlier comments?

> Rust is older than Go and it was already confusing people into thinking enums and sum types are the same thing

Of course the social landscape depends on people actually using it. None of the people who weren’t using Rust at the time were magically confused about enums and sum types by the mere existence of some new and experimental language.

Rust barely existed at the time Go was first being developed. And given the history of Go and the notoriety of its core team for flatly ignoring prior work in programming languages, it’s extremely unlikely that Pike et al gave more than a cursory glance to what nascent Rust was doing at the time.

But even if they had, to suggest that they intentionally replicated a dumb thing from C but gave it a different name to avoid users being confused by a different thing from a language that roughly nobody knew about at the time is bananas.

	▲	9rx 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Of course the social landscape depends on people actually using it. That's nonsense. Brainfuck has shaped the social landscape despite effectively nobody using it, and absolutely nobody using it for any real work. The social landscape is not at all dependent on use. > And given the history of Go and the notoriety of its core team for flatly ignoring prior work in programming languages Huh? Go comes straight out of prior work. It is nearly indistinguishable from Alef. What the Go language flatly ignored was being innovative. Reasonably so, of course. It wasn't trying to innovate in programming languages so that we'd have another to throw on the heap of languages nobody uses. It was trying to solve a specific business problem using well-established methods.