And indeed they did come to that conclusion - for Dart 2.

Go is the product of like 3 Googlers' tastes. It isn't some perfect answer born out of the experience of thousands of geniuses.

I think they got a lot right - fantastic tooling, avoiding glibc, auto-formatting, tabs, even the "no functional programming so you have to write simple code" thing is definitely a valid position. But I don't think anyone can seriously argue that Go's handling of null is anything but a huge mistake.

But those people at Google were veteran researchers who wanted to make a language that could scale for Google's use cases; these things are well documented.

For example, Ken Thompson has said his job at Google was just to find things he could make better.