There might be some selection bias, users who still like the contents of the current frontpage are more likely to still be around than users who as the frontpage shifted away from their taste visit it less often.
It is such a shame that ARM has taken over MIPS place in the embedded world, and that SGI crashed and killed it in the server space, MIPS is a much nicer architecture than ARM or PPC, (and nevermind SPARK or god forbid IA64).
I'm not a big fan of RMS, but this is a good point, in our current world the freedom to control the software that runs on devices you own is becoming more and more essential, not having that freedom undermines all other freedoms (from privacy to free speech).
Everyone should read this post, the origins of copyright are very enlightening when trying to understand the insane system we have now.
Intellectual property is system of monopolies inherently incompatible with a competitive, creative and innovative free market, how the IP-industry managed to turn this argument around in the minds of most people is truly scary.
Welcome to the Internet. As Paul Vixie pointed out ages ago: "The Internet is not for sissies."
Trolls are almost as old as the net, and they are not going to disappear without something short of a big-brother state that makes the Great Firewall Of China look like kids play.
So better get used to it.
Also remember:
"Liberty resides in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious." — John Stuart Mill
[Disclaimer: I have often been labeled a troll, and I'm not offended by this label.]
Go is mind-stretching in its practicality and pragmatism.
Most (but not all) its ideas have been implemented before elsewhere (but then, that is almost bound to be true of any new language).
But the real 'innovation' is in the careful selection of those ideas and in how well they work together _in practice_.
This puts off people who are used to this or that feature in other languages, Go is not about checklists of features or abstract arguments about how languages should be, it is about what works really well when you sit down to write (or read) code.
Google is a very big and diverse organization, I'm sure there are some that do promote pretty much every language you ever heard of (and many you didn't).
Actually, I remember some years ago reading about some Googlers that used C#, no clue what for, and it was a while ago, but it is not unrealistic.
There have been many changes to both the Go language and the stdlib, but it is really easy to keep your code updated (specially since gofix was introduced: http://blog.golang.org/2011/04/introducing-gofix.html ) so this should not be an obstacle to learning the language.
That said, version "1" of the language is due for early next year, which should provide a long-term stable language and set of libraries, for details see:
All technology should be a means to an end. Anything else is either art of intellectual masturbation.
I suspect most claims of how new technology makes people who 'live tech' more productive are mostly placebo effect, and in part naturally self-servingly so, after all, who wants to believe their job/industry/life is not all that important/relevant to the real world?
Also, most modern software/hardware is not particularly exciting from a usefulness point of view. It is mostly the same stuff that has been around for ages in a slightly smaller package with a new coat of paint.