Google is now becoming the most innovative IT company in the world. Every now and then they would deliver one revolutionary product to us such as Google Glass, Google Fiber, Automatic Mobile Cars etc. All these great products are backed up by the powerful software system built into. Google has used many programming languages to develop these software and they have put much resource in improving the programming languages they use and we use today.
What has Google done in improving programming languages? Simon Willison,gives some proofs of what Google has done. Google invest vast resources in to language improvements, and have been doing so for over a decade now.
- 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
- Dart/ Dart is a new web programming language with libraries, a virtual machine, and tools. It helps developers build structured modern web apps, and it compiles to JavaScript to run across the entire modern web.
- Google also published their internal JavaScript style guide which enables developers write maintainable and readable JavaScript codes. This guide is also now being followed by many developers from all around the world. https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javascriptguide.xml
- Through Google Summer of Code they financially support projects that benefit dozens of open source languages, libraries and frameworks
To public, Google is always thought as a company which brings revolutionary products to the world such as Google Glass. But from above listings, we can also find Google has brought us lots of incremental innovations which are less well known.
What else can you think of the contribution Google brings to the programming language community?
