It's obvious that Golang is Google's language. The most obvious part is they require a CLA that gives them and only them special rights. It's a sham.
Care to explain what a CLA is? Assuming a legal term...?
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Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
81–90 of 346 posts
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#82Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had m…
I know of more than one organization that have decided against Angular in recent years primarily because of Google's backing of the project. Skepticism of the big three (four?) tech giants is growing, especially if you've had some of your market carved out by them.
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#83Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had m…
What about Ruby?
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#84Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had m…
What about Ruby?
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Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#85Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had m…
Is that really true though? What abiut python and javascript for example? Did they have a giant corp behind them?
It certainly is in the last decade or so. Python is a language from the early nineties and took decades to achieve it's current level of popularity.
Javascript was backed by Netscape, and later by Microsoft/IE. It would never have succeeded without corporate backing and being on of the 2.5 usable languages on the web (Java was the other one, I'm counting ActiveX/VBScript as half)
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#86Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had m…
Is that really true though? What abiut python and javascript for example? Did they have a giant corp behind them?
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Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#87> The blog post starts by quoting @kapoorsunny asking why there can't be something like OpenGo, with a community implementation of generics. I hope that it is clear that the answer is that there could be. Nothing prevents that from happening. In particular, Google doesn't prevent that from happening. No, but like with the community developed dependency solution, Google can arbitrarily chose not to include it in Go, e…
But this is the same with any open source project - you can write as much code as you want, but if those with the commit bits decide they don't like it, it's not getting upstreamed. If you were really keen to push some functionality into the Linux kernel, but Linus decided he didn't like it, you'd be in exactly the same position. The fact that in Go's case quite a lot of the maintainers work at Google doesn't really…
> The fact that in Go's case quite a lot of the maintainers work at Google doesn't really change much.
It does if those calling the shots aren’t the committers but their bosses.
I’m not saying that’s how it is, but if it is, it changes things a great deal.
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#88> those executives, and upper management in general, have never made any attempt to affect how the Go language and tools and standard library are developed
Power and control aren't about whether you've attempted to change something, they're about whether you can change something.
If Google ever had a conflict between the core Go team vs the people who make money for the company, you can be sure who will win out in that debate. Saying that it's never happened before or that it's unlikely to happen doesn't change the fundamental power dynamics that people are upset about.
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#89Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had m…
Is that really true though? What abiut python and javascript for example? Did they have a giant corp behind them?
JavaScript is an interesting case, in that it was the only way to write code that would run in Netscape Navigator at the time. In a sense it had Netscape behind it, and then it had Microsoft behind it once they reverse-engineered an implementation for IE3.
I'm not very familiar with the history of Python, though it seems it was funded in its early years by various research institutes that employed Guido van Rossum, rather than a giant corporation.
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course not, it's not Google's language, it's Rob Pike's language. The logo was designed by his wife, and most of the questionable design choices in Go are there because of his opinions, such as the dubious dependency management and lack of generics. A lot of the power of go comes from it being opinionated, but that same opinionated approach is a real pain for some (it turns out common) use cases. With all that sai…
> The logo was designed by his wife They changed it. https://blog.golang.org/go-brand
"Changed" is a bit of a strong word here. The go home page still includes no instances of the new logo, and several of the Gopher - https://golang.org