Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

groups.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 346 posts

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

#151

Post by [deleted] »

bigtunacan wrote: post #148
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 thes…

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by bboreham »

revel wrote: post #94
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.

My takeaway from this is that there is no active attempt to influence the direction of Go to fit Google's agenda and that's a good thing. However, active influence isn't necessary to shape Go's direction and functionality. Probably the best example of this are the twin canker sores of GOPATH and dep. Anyone who has wanted to develop multiple projects in isolation has run into issues with these two and the way that th…

I have news for you: ‘dep’ was abruptly demolished by ‘go mod’ about a year ago.

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

#153

Post by iends »

tomnipotent wrote: post #147
bradleyjg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

You're comments are getting quite circular. Your original post in this thread was implying that since the project is open source, corporate sponsorship was less important.

At least that is how it reads.

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

#154

Post by DiseasedBadger »

javajosh wrote: post #130
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…

> You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real Counter-examples: Clojure, Elm.

I've heard about those before. What are they?

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

#155

Post by gchamonlive »

bigtunacan wrote: post #148
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 thes…

in the early 90s the languages had to provide fewer features to be considered adoptable. Once people adopted that language they had to expand it.

Nowadays if you want to create a new language there is a minimum set of features everybody expects that raises the complexity quite high. You could just create a bare language but who would adopt that?

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

#156

Post by DannyBee »

mabbo wrote: post #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 th…

Those conflicts have existed for years (since go was created in fact) and despite your claim about who is "sure" to win, it turns out you were wrong and continue to be wrong about who wins.

I always wonder why HN is full of people who are so sure of the outcomes instead of asking for data about what actually happened.

Its definitely easier to just assert things than ask for perspectives and data that might conflict with your own experience, but you are rarely going to learn anything interesting that way.

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

#157

Post by blaisio »

I definitely feel that Google owns Go and it is a language designed for Google's purposes, but that didn't dissuade me from using it. It only makes me not want to contribute to the core language, just as Google's control over Chrome makes me not want to contribute to chromium.

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

#158

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

0815test wrote: post #114
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…

> ...but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's a C-like language with GC, that compiles to native code supported by an efficient runtime, and can work effectively with parallel/concurrent code. In many ways it's Java done right, or a more intuitive (and from certain POVs, preferable) alternative to Haskell and Ocaml. That would seem to be enough to drive adoption.

Then why did D never take off?

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

#159

Post by giancarlostoro »

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”.

I think Go is self sustainable. What would be nice is if they finally made "The Go foundation" idek if thats a thing yet but every language even D and Python have a foundation. Then ownership of domain etc can go to that Foundation.

Also Go will be fine. For example the Windows version of Go was all implemented by the Go community. The core devs were only focused on Unix and Mac at the time. I think Go will be fine.

People love the language and its being used by many in industry. Just look at Docker and other utils coded in Go. If you download Chrome or Android SDK / images from Google you are using a Go server to download those files.

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

#160

Post by skybrian »

wpietri wrote: post #61
fastball wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you had signed up for the mailing list, which is how mailing lists are supposed to work.

It's how mailing lists were supposed to work circa 1992. But web archives for mailing lists are more than 20 years old. [1] And honestly, I'm not sure "supposed to work" is correct. It's how they did work, sure, but thinking back to the mailing lists I set up pre-web, the goal was to create a forum many people could use. That a mailing list was used to do that was a function of the available tech and how people conne…

The Well isn't a great example here. You can't read anything on the Well (other than a couple of public forums) without signing up for a paid account and disclosing your real name.

For early BBS's it was routine to create an account before doing much of anything, though they often didn't verify anything. I think some had a limited anonymous account you could use?

Was there anything before gopher that let you seamlessly jump from machine to machine?

Post reply on HN