Comment by seanmcdirmid

Not very accurate. Rob Pike pursued a unique line of PL design research from a systems perspective that was never integrated into mainstream PL design research. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, it is what happen when communities are isolated (they develop technologies independently, see the Americas vs. Europe/Asia before Columbus). The fact that the world is much smaller now (via globalization and the internet) means that diversity necessarily decreases to converge on an identified local optimum. Go is interesting since it rejects this pressure and explores an alternative path where PL technology could go, which seems to have paid off (it has use cases and has attracted users).