Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why doesn’t Google use their resources to improve coding languages?

24th November 2013

My answer to Why doesn’t Google use their resources to improve coding languages? on Quora

Google invest vast resources in to language improvements, and have been doing so for over a decade now. Just off the top of my head...

• They have employed many of the Python core team (including creator Guido van Rossum) and supported their work on Python
• Their Android team wrote and support an entirely new open source JVM, called Dalvik
• They sponsored one of the creators of C to create a brand new systems programming language, Go.
• They sponsored major improvements to HTML, including the WHAT-WG which was crucial to the creation of HTML5.
• Many of their employees work full time contributing to international standards groups.
• As part of Chrome they supported the creation of V8, an astonishingly powerful JIT JavaScript implementation which sparked enormous improvements across rival engines. V8 is also the core of Node.js
• Through Google Summer of Code they financially support projects that benefit dozens of open source languages, libraries and frameworks

That’s just the stuff I can think if without doing any additional research—it’s the tip of the iceberg.