I was under the impression he worked in a relatively small team working on code thats used by lots and lots of people, but only written by a few people.
The OP's point is that when you have people you dont trust working on your code (and does he really?) there need to be controls somewhere to keep everything from getting screwed up.
OO is one way of doing that; a good set of unit tests + CI is another.
I work with him at Google. Google has a single codebase shared by tens of thousands of engineers. People have areas of that that they own, but it is a wrong characterisation to say Rob "works in relative isolation from other programmers".
At Google, how large is the Go community compared to the C++ or Java community, or the community working on a shared application code base like the Search engine?
I was under the impression he worked in a relatively small team working on code thats used by lots and lots of people, but only written by a few people.
The OP's point is that when you have people you dont trust working on your code (and does he really?) there need to be controls somewhere to keep everything from getting screwed up.
OO is one way of doing that; a good set of unit tests + CI is another.