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Go is Google's language, not ours

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Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For community driven programming languages I would say PHP, large user base, mature & very active.

I'd use this as an argument that if PHP is the gold standard for a community-driven programming language, I'd rather every popular language be backed by a large corp haha. Actually, even ignoring PHP, I'm vaguely convinced it's generally better for a language to be backed by a company. I personally feel more secure knowing that there are people whose full-time job is to take care of the language, and I trust communit…

Purists will agree with you. Pragmatists perhaps not so much.

I'm sad to see this opinion every time somebody mentions PHP. PHP may have its flaws. But how can anyone deny the instrumental role PHP has played in building the web as we know it today?

The open web, open source, open standards, agile were supposed to be the free market answer to all the flaws of the big old corporations. And for a large part they have succeeded in creating the new and better world we enjoy today. But it looks like we're experiencing some regression. The new big corporations of the web are becoming more like the big corporations of the past. Corporate structures, HR departments, Shareholder meetings, Management layers, system thinking are again replacing the success of uncertain organic growth models that involve chaos, diversity, agility, attitude and pragmatism. To see media outlets advertising social media handles as opposed to their web addresses. Purists are on the rise. Perhaps because everyone is seeking those comfortable high paying jobs at the big corporations?

PHP has fought and won its battles. Outfoxing many big corporate opponents along the way. It should get the respect it deserves. And if you ever find yourself at the front-lines of a new battle. PHP might still very well be your most effective weapon of choice. A worthy consideration at least.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#162
I'm going to risk being labeled an ~incompetent dev~ or whatever but learning golang was seriously a breath of fresh air compared to literally any language I have ever tried to grok before.

Everything felt like it was there on purpose. It always seemed like there was a "proper" way to achieve something. Being told to use this opinionated formatter was like removing a 40kg bag after a bush walk. You never have to worry about if you're writing Go "the right way", because it's extensively documented what that way is.

Generics is an awesome feature, writing C# is my day job so sometimes I miss it, but I have full faith in the designers when they say it will be in the language in a "Go appropriate way". The last thing I personally want to see is Go being handed over to the community to be designed by committee.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#163
post #89
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing you don’t use C or C++ either then because they were proprietary Bell Labs languages. You should probably rule out assembly too because they will have proprietary instructions for proprietary CPUs. Which means if you really want to be freed from the shackles of using proprietary tools when programming you’re now building your own hardware too, processors and all. Good job ASCII isn’t proprietary otherwis…

Guess away, but both C and C++ broke out of Bell control very, very quickly by language standards. Now they are driven by ISO Standards bodies, with many, many participants -- ATT not among them anymore, to my knowledge. Even in 1995 ATT had nothing approaching veto power. My remarks lumping Java in with C# and Swift are transparent wishful thinking.

Those ISO standards cost 100 euros on average per language version.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#164
post #32
post #14

"... can't we have something like OpenGo ..." > " ... this won't happen ... " I'm confused as to what's stopping someone from forking it, calling it OpenGo, and building a community around that.

This could be done, of course. But how likely is such an approach to succeed? It would effectively create a new language and in turn to a new ecosystem. Why not just use a different language (Rust comes to mind) then?

Rust is not a suitable replacement for Go.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#165
post #116
post #87

Golang solves a specific domain problem google has. They extended plan9s c compiler with some syntax Sugar for co routines and fixed some whacky c stuff then threw in some gc. There's new and innovated about golang. They just had to open source golang because they used the plan 9 c compiler which was open source.

A small group of programming language professionals with fifty+ years of shared experience developing compilers decided to keep on going with the language family they invented and extended.

Specially when one compares Limbo and Oberon-2 features to Go.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#166
post #130
post #24

Actually there are relatively few real (TM) open source projects driven by the community, at least if you look at important projects. Many open source projects are just commercial projects driven mainly by a single company. Look for example at Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, and Elasticsearch. They follow exactly the model described in the article. Technologies like these could have been developed by a community, too, but it…

Apache and Linux have always been the two big examples of community-driven open source projects. And Apache still hosts many community-driven open source projects, but they don't seem to be as visible as they were 10-15 years ago.

Some Apache projects, sure. But Spark is very much a Databricks project. Hadoop used to be fairly community as there were hands in it from Cloudera, Hortonworks, Microsoft, and a few others. But with the merger of Cloudera and Hortonworks, the expectation is that it will become guided by that organization.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For community driven programming languages I would say PHP, large user base, mature & very active.

I'd use this as an argument that if PHP is the gold standard for a community-driven programming language, I'd rather every popular language be backed by a large corp haha. Actually, even ignoring PHP, I'm vaguely convinced it's generally better for a language to be backed by a company. I personally feel more secure knowing that there are people whose full-time job is to take care of the language, and I trust communit…

Is modern PHP really that bad? I kind of think it makes a lot of sense in a world where almost everything, even major government IT systems, are basically java/.net on the backend and some JavaScript MVVM framework on the client.

I know a guy who works with laravel, and we’ve teased him so much about PHP over the years, because PHP. The truth is, that his backend is actually more suited for the modern world than what we currently run. .Net core is getting to where it’s competitive, but it’s still a bitch to build something like a mixed asp mvc and Vue components app, which is truly effective/productive alternative to MVVM clients or jquery/Ajax for smaller projects.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#168
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder why so many companies are happily paying Oracle (and the likes) tons of money instead of sponsoring an open source project like PostgreSQL. Because that are plenty of nice enterprise features that PostgreSQL still doesn't cover.

Could you name some I’m pretty curious? For my use case it’s a no brainer because only PostgreSQL have a decent GIS extension, last time I checked Oracle was lagging well behind.

- Distributed transactions across cluster nodes

- The IDE experience with PL/SQL, including graphical debugging of stored procedures

- Compiling PL/SQL to native code for better performance

- Running bare metal without an underlying OS

- Oracle RAC

- The fine tuning options on their JDBC and .NET drivers

- A proper C++ driver API

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#169
post #146

C# unfortunately has the same issue, but the effect is much more visible. Few people (I'm sure you can find examples, but given how popular the language is on Windows, it's a tiny minority) use C# outside of Windows and it's a shame. There is no good open ecosystem so even as a former Windows dev I hardly use it anymore.

The limiting factor for me, as a long-time C# dev now working outside of Windows, is that many of the tools I used haven't been ported to .NET Core.

Take Umbraco, for example. If someone were to port it to .NET Core and rewrite parts of it to use Postgres as a db option there would be zero reason to ever use WordPress again.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#170
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any example of a successful large open source project that's truly lead by the community, and not a handful of people that decide what goes in and what doesn't? What would such a model even look like?

you can see it already on github - survival of the fittest fork

In theory yes, in practice though, there's a lot of projects where the lead maintainer has vanished or doesn't spend a lot of time on it anymore making the future of the whole project and its forks debatable. Most forks aren't interested in taking the lead. The only exception I can think of was the nodejs fork, IO.js, which ended up being more of a political move and a kick up the arse for the Node team. A similar kick was given to the NPM team when Yarn started making waves.
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