> I strongly doubt it was to solve a problem, just someone with a lot of clout had a pet project. I don't know office politics there, sure. But Go most definit

> I strongly doubt it was to solve a problem, just someone with a lot of clout had a pet project. I don't know office politics there, sure. But Go most definitely solved problems by having a language optimized for fast(er) builds and generally being a language you can write code without thinking too hard about and getting good runtime performance out of. Many languages start out as pet projects, but can often solve a real problem such that they see internal adoption. That adoption can grow for various reasons, and in some cases, end up creating a sociotechnical system where it's now a thing even though it never started out with the intention of being a thing. It's at this time that demand is a key driver behind adoption, new features, etc. Do you still feel that Go "doesn't count" with respect to demand? > second because it attempts to patch an existing trainwreck and isn't even a new language. Firstly, JavaScript is hardly a trainwreck of a language, considering how successful it has been with respect to adoption and having such an incredible ecosystem for developers to work in. I worked on a typed functional programming language for 5 years, so be aware that my statement isn't one of ignorance of other languages. But nonetheless, since this is really a philosophical question, what exactly makes up a new language to you? In TypeScript, the type system is Turing Complete. It's a novel type system; there is no other language with the same set of features and semantics associated with it. I can write very functional and type-heavy TypeScript today and it's really not reminiscent of JavaScript aside from a few syntactical elements. Do you still feel that it "doesn't count"?