Google Go started in 1972

The whole point of those early commits is that it's a joke! Just go read them. They are basically laying out the simple Hello, World! program and showing its evolution over time.<p>1972: Hello, World! is written in B 1974: Hello, World! is re-written for the new C language 1988: Hello, World! is written in ANSI C (two commits, go read them to see the diff) 2008: Go

I know Google likes long betas, but this is ridiculous.

That's hilarious. I don't quite get the dates for ANSI C, though. The draft date looks correct, but Wikipedia has it being ratified in 1989.<p>Incidentally, here's a great thread that just shows the more things change the more they stay the same (from 1988): <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thread/ab6fa381e5b0b840/20b174b18cdd919d?hl=en%14b174b18cdd919d" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thr...</a><p>Quotes:<p>"This process could go on forever, but there is a strong desire to adopt a "good enough" standard in a timely fashion rather than working toward a "perfect" standard that is too late to matter. Many of us feel that the current draft is "good enough""<p>"C is rapidly catching up with Pascal as the second most well known language but it has a long way to go before it becomes as well know (and perhaps as useful)as BASIC"

Google Go started in 1972 in the same sense as Clojure started in 1960.

Meta comment: What is with all the smiley faces in these comments? 6 in 24 comments. Either people here get weirdly giddy over Google or the userbase is now mostly in their teens.

<a href="http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=4e9a5b0955321f15379f80dcc96cdb8b3eb4eb0d" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=4e9a5b0955321f15...</a>

Can someone explain to me what I'm looking at? I don't get what this is, or it's significance? It is a joke of some kind?

99.9% of it coming after 2008.<p>Actually, this is a good idea. I'm going to go name-squat repositories on every other hard-to-search programming language name I can think of.

Where did the early commits come from? What revision control systems existed back in 1972?

Looks like Go is forked from B?.

hahaha, B -&#62; C -&#62; ANSI C -&#62; GO Spec :)

Lets hope this shuts up all the annoying people that got nothing better to do than to whine about a similar name having been used by another language, now it is clear who was first ;)

Was it called 'go' back then? Or did they just search their archived servers to find anything dated so long ago no one could argue with them?