Comment by nindalf

What a curious standard you use to judge inventions. Inventions from Google inspired by previous approaches are discredited as derivative ... while inventions by Bell Labs also inspired by previous approaches get a free pass?

Are you under the impression that Unix was the first operating system, or that C was the first programming language? What do you reckon about C++, also invented at Bell Labs? The folks at Bell Labs were giants and they stood on the shoulders of giants.

Carbon could make a substantial difference to the safety of C++ software by migrating such codebases to a relatively safer language. That's an improvement that we benefit from because Google and friends are publishing it as FOSS. Has a similar approach of gradual migration been done before? Kotlin and TypeScript did it. Eschewing C++ templates for generics? That's from Swift. Using syntax that's easy to read and to parse? Inspired by Rust. They're up front that they're inspired by all these successful languages.

But who cares? The fact is, something doesn't need to be completely novel for it to be useful. You can denigrate the work of others all you like, but all work that's done by humans is inspired by previous work by someone else. That's a fundamental fact of life. Even something as game changing as the transistor was inspired by existing vacuum tubes.