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Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

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Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#141

Post by 0815test »

coldtea wrote: post #14

> 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…

It wasn't arbitrary. The community dependency solution was half-baked: it couldn't support the case of dependencies relying on multiple major versions of the same module. Even Rust is very careful to allow this, and nobody would describe Rust as being anything other than community-led. That this was the issue was made very clear by tye folks who criticized that solution, btw.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#142

Post by microtonal »

brianberns wrote: post #7
nickcw wrote: post #4

A very well written piece by Ian Lance Taylor. If you don't want to read it all, he summarizes it here: > In effect, then, the current state is what the blog post suggests at the very end: final decisions about the Go language are made by the core Go team, and the core Go team all work at Google, but there is no meaningful sense in which Google, apart from the core Go team, makes decisions about the language.

> There is no meaningful sense in which Google, apart from the core Go team, makes decisions about the language. That's like saying that there's no meaningful sense in which I, apart from my brain and nervous system, make decisions about what my body does.

I was not really convinced by that line of argumentation either.

For me, the more convincing argument is that Go would have probably happened in a parallel universe as well. Imagine that Griesemer, Pike, and Thompson had worked another company that gives the freedom to work on personal projects, it is very likely that they had come up with the same language. They have argued in talks that Go was created as an answer to problems that they identified in the development of infrastructure at Google. That may have been a trigger, but Go is firmly rooted in the tradition of C, UNIX, Plan 9, and Limbo and a logical next step in that tradition.

Hence, to me, Go is really Griesemer, Pike, Thompson, and Cox' language and not Google's language.

Of course, the title of the original article that Taylor is reacting to was a bit sensational. But I think the original point was that Go is not a language that is developed by the community, but a small set of people. Whether they are employed by Google, Facebook, Uber, or Zalando is somewhat irrelevant to this debate.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#143

Post by skybrian »

mr_tristan wrote: post #117

I kind of read the original argument that Go is dominated by a "Google point of view", and there really isn't a significant alternative view that's as coherent. And that may be a risk. It's not obvious to figure out how Go "plays with others". And it's unclear if that's much of a risk or not. As an outsider, you read of the funky module system duality and you wonder... "What if I don't want to 'work like Google'? Wil…

That seems like a special case. Kotlin swaps in easily because it was designed to be compatible with Java, and you've bought into the Java ecosystem already.

For someone coming from a different ecosystem, it would be a big jump.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#144

Post by hu3 »

tomnipotent wrote: post #123
mr_tristan wrote: post #117

I kind of read the original argument that Go is dominated by a "Google point of view", and there really isn't a significant alternative view that's as coherent. And that may be a risk. It's not obvious to figure out how Go "plays with others". And it's unclear if that's much of a risk or not. As an outsider, you read of the funky module system duality and you wonder... "What if I don't want to 'work like Google'? Wil…

> And that may be a risk. How is it a risk? Is Rust at risk because of Mozilla? What about Java given all its corporate sponsors? People need to stop with this predictive FUD crap, it's tiring.

It's mesmerizing to observe the lengths that people can go when trying to smear an open-source tool.

I can't even fathom the amount of relentless bullshit that teams of big projects have to endure.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#145

Post by bradleyjg »

toasterlovin wrote: post #113
tacosx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yehuda Katz said something a while ago that stuck with me. He likened Ember’s community model to Postgres. That is, relatively small levels of support from lots of different organizations. I think there’s a lot of wisdom is such an approach.

It’s open development vs open source.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#146

Post by petepete »

toasterlovin wrote: post #109
iamgopal wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basecamp.

Basecamp supports Rails . Ruby is mostly developed by a community of Japanese developers.

While this might have been true, it was that screencast and the rise of Rails that put Ruby on the map in the west.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#147

Post by tomnipotent »

bradleyjg wrote: post #137
tomnipotent wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good thing it's an open source project and not a web service, then.

Source code is of limited use if a company decides it is no longer interested and never allowed external developers into the processes that would have, over time, given them the necessary context to run with the project. At that point the only real hope the project has is that some nucleus of people quit the former sponsoring company to keep it going.

Almost every major significant OSS project has a corporate sponsor (usually in the form of paid employees doing the bulk of contributions). Don't see the problem with that.

And it's usually problems people are solving are work that instigate most of these contributions, so it's a damn good thing Go has a company like Google to act as steward, regardless of all the useless FUD people like to pretend "may" happen because they can think it up.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#148

Post by bigtunacan »

c3534l wrote: post #58

Everyone'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…

History doesn't really support that. PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml, Lua. Successful programming languages seem to come in equal measures from both large corporate backers and not.

There is certainly the need for network effects which large corporations often can provide more consistently, but we have seen plenty of examples within the space where individuals or smaller companies have been successful in providing these same network effects.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#149

Post by tomohawk »

KirinDave wrote: post #17

Googler here, but these are my own opinions formed from less than a year at the company. My observation of Google's culture is that it can be very difficult to see the ways in which they dominate projects they participate in because it's very difficult to keep perspective on how even small investments by Google tend to overwhelm the volume of other contributers project. Google has a lot of great, productive engineers…

There are many of us in the Go community who like Go the way it is. The last thing we want is another Java ecosystem, which feels like something designed by archonaut committee more than anything coherent. Better to not have generics than to have generics that are bodged into the language like they were in Java.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#150

Post by CalChris »

scarface74 wrote: post #99

Not saying anything about Go necessarily, but Google being behind a technology doesn’t exactly give me a warm and fuzzy that it will be “supported for years to come”.

Is this really a comment on Google or is it a comment on the velocity of platforms in general? I think Go has reached a sufficient momentum that it will be supported for years to come, regardless of its parentage. Not everything Google does is Orkut. Not everything other people do is LLVM.
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