"I always have it in the back of my head that I want to make a slightly better C. Just to clean up some of the rough edges and fix some of the more egregious problems."
This is called Go. Brought to you by the same people who gave you C.
No it is not. Go is only "like C" in the sense of the most superficial syntactic similarities and that it is primitive. It isn't even in the same world as C, it is just another high level garbage collected language that compares poorly with the rest of the languages in that group. Go was not brought to us by the people who made C. It was brought to us by Rob Pike and Russ Cox. Dennis Ritchie gave us C.
Ken Thomson was (and is) also involved with creating Go and he was also one of the writers of Unix. He actually invented the B language which preceeded C, so it was close :-)
I think he wrote a lot of C in Unix and was therefore part of making C popular.
Ken had nearly as little involvement in Go as he had in C, they just asked him stuff. Did he write any of it at all? "From the same people as C" is a factual claim, and it is factually incorrect. Ken absolutely did not bring us C, and it is very sketchy to claim he brought us go. Go is brought to us by the guy who came to bell labs after it was all over and decided to try to pass himself off as "the bell labs guy!" for the rest of eternity.
Just putting this from the official FAQ, for the record.
Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson started
sketching the goals for a new language on the white board
on September 21, 2007. Within a few days the goals had
settled into a plan to do something and a fair idea of what
it would be. Design continued part-time in parallel with
unrelated work. By January 2008, Ken had started work on a
compiler with which to explore ideas; it generated C code
as its output. By mid-year the language had become a
full-time project and had settled enough to attempt a
production compiler.
Yeah, that's deliberately selling Ken's involvement as hard as you can without dishonesty, and it still shows he wasn't actually involved in go, just "exploring ideas for a language".
This is called Go. Brought to you by the same people who gave you C.