Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language” • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by bigtunacan » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

atombender wrote: post #170

bigtunacan wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Python came out of CWI in the Netherlands, where Guido van Rossum worked and had previously developed the language ABC. OCaml came out of INRIA in Paris. So both had institutional backing and financing.

While it's certainly a form of institutional backing it's very dissimilar to Google as CWI and INRIA are both research institutes. They would have their own network effects within research and academia, but that doesn't necessarily translate to wider scale adoption.

That's sort of why I threw in OCaml; largely it is still only successful within academia. Python on the other hand had similar beginnings, but has been wildly successful both in academia and in common use.

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

#182

Post by mr_tristan » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

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 _might_ be an institutional risk for people, who are evaluating tooling, to just decide that they don't see other major companies getting involved, see a bunch of gripes about the module system switcheroo, and decide "nah".

You really get a sense of "this is Google's approach" with the go toolchain, because it's pretty unique. One of the first documents, "How to Write Go Code", sets up a workspace that doesn't clearly integrate in with any other toolchain I'm aware of.

So, just by reading about the ecosystem, it's not clear who is really investing in it, and, you have a single, unique approach to tooling apparently dominating.

I just wonder if these arguments would be mitigated if Go ever got the investment in "developer relations" that other Google projects get, with some better onboarding documentation.

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

#183

Post by KirinDave » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

keymone wrote: post #101

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…

> Rich Hickey's conflict with the Clojure community over overly biasing Clojure towards Datomic's interest I’m not sure I would describe it that way. I don’t know of anything in Clojure language that is biased towards Datomic’s interest (or Cognitec’s). The conflict was about Rich not having enough time to consider/review/accept changes to the language core and declining to relax acceptance of such changes without hi…

Having been a part of that conversation and mad enough about it that I've effectively abandoned the use of Clojure: I am quite certain I'd describe it that way.

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

#184

Post by devbat8712 » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

DiseasedBadger wrote: post #154

javajosh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

clojure is lisp on the jvm. not sure about elm.

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

#185

Post by KirinDave » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

tomohawk wrote: post #149

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.

Well I'm glad you're happy with things the way they are! But this doesn't necessarily mean we should ignore the folks who are not.

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

#186

Post by nonsense1234 » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #158

0815test wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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?

For a long time D wasn't open source, didn't work very well on Windows, had a very limited standard library, and had poor IDE support. There's also a large divide in the community around garbage collection vs manual memory management.

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

#187

Post by reilly3000 » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

Is there any incident where a patch that was antithetical to Google’s business interests that was specifically blocked by the Go core team? If not, then I’d say there’s nothing to see here.

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

#188

Post by verttii » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

spamizbad wrote: post #165

gchamonlive wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Isn't that kind of what Elixir and Clojure did? Neither language is festooned with bells and whistles and both leveraged the Erlang VM and JVM respectively to assist in bootstrapping their ecosystems.

Actually, Elixir did add the bells and whistles to Erlang, sort of. That is pretty much the whole point of Elixir.

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

#189

Post by simias » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #102

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”.

What does it even mean for it to be "supported for years to come"? It's not a web service.

Keep the language working on newer devices, update the compiler, expose new features of the hardware etc...

Even if you don't mind if the language itself stops evolving you still need somebody to maintain it. I'm fine coding in C99 without the features of newer standards but if I can't find a C compiler that can efficiently target modern architectures I have a problem.

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

#190

Post by simias » Mon, May 27, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #158

0815test wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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?

I don't necessarily agree with the parent's point but D managed to fumble early on and never managed to catch up ever since. Around the time it got released (in the early 2000's) I was a C++ coder and I remember being very interested, only to immediately dismiss it as soon as I learned that it wasn't fully open source. I'm sure other devs didn't mind as much as I did but it definitely stunted growth early on. By the time they fixed this "issue" there was a lot of competition in that space and I never bothered looking back.