Minor nitpick: That already happened, Limbo is what happened when Bell Labs wrote Java.

And go is very very derived from plan 9. It could be considered a sibling of limbo in a lot of ways.

Huh. I managed to hear about Inferno, but not remember the Limbo part.

In that case, Go is Bell Labs' second attempt at Java.

Third, there was also a language I can't remember the name of that happened at the same time as Alef.

Newsqueak?

That may have been what I was thinking of (or Squeak, for that matter, if my sense of time was off), but I'm not sure!

More like Limbo and Inferno.

Limbo doesn't only run on Inferno; anything with the Dis VM will work.

Interesting comment, as 2 of the main Go creators (Ken Thompson and Rob Pike) did work at the Bell Labs. So while I doubt they tried to write Java, Go in a sense was written by the Bell Labs :).

(And Kernighan was their floor-mate too, that must have been a stunningly great environment)

I was taking that into consideration when I authored my comment!

>Go is what would have happened if Bell Labs wrote Java

And Unix is what happened when Bell Labs wrote an operating system -- something that was born outdated from the start.

Just like Golang.

Yet simple enough to be understood and its features actually used, widespread and that stood the test of time.