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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”

#231

Post by tsimionescu »

bboreham wrote: post #152
revel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's still years after it was pointed out as a problem; and it still hasn't permeated to many Go projects.

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

#232

Post by zzzcpan »

et2o wrote: post #23

“It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It” —- Google employee’s defenses of Go Even if it is theoretically true that Go is open source, by employing the majority of the Core Go team, Google exercises extensive soft power over Go. All of the defenses of Go seem to gloss over this.

Agreed. It was interesting to see self contradicting things in the post of how management doesn't control anything and yet people somehow get hired into the core team. And it's not just soft power. Google can actually hire people that serve its interests well and fire those that don't. This is pretty much as much power as possible to have over a project.

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

#234

Post by apta »

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.

> In many ways it's Java done right

Not quite:

* no generics

* error prone error handling

* non tunable GC

* null pointers

* golang interfaces are messy and can't be used to tag structures

* golang time package is garbage

and lots more

Java today is superior to golang in almost every front.

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

#235

Post by saturn_vk »

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”.

Why? This isn't some closed-source web service like Reader that needs to be reimplemented from scratch. The code is there, and due to demand, maintenance will be provided.

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

#236

Post by patosai »

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?

Elm is a JS framework for rendering views. It has a type system and guarantees no runtime errors while being fast. The language compiles into JS.

https://elm-lang.org/

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

#238

Post by KirinDave »

keymone wrote: post #209
KirinDave wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you should easily be able to answer a simple question: what in Clojure is biased towards Datomic?

My experience with this conversation is that there is nothing I could say that would make you ever acknowledge my experience or feelings. Even the act of stating my opinion on a subjective matter is getting downvoted, because folks are so eager to NOT talk about this except under the lens of Hickey making shirt jokes.

And it drives home the actual point I wanted to make about how some languages are in theory forkable, but in practice are very much run by a central figure who exercises powerful social control via the inertia of prior involvement and the social power of the community eager to defend them.

So thank you for bringing us back on topic.

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

#239

Post by apta »

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.

> The last thing we want is another Java ecosystem,

Which practically contains almost everything one can think of? Yeah, like that's not a good thing. Where's the golang equivalent of Hadoop, Spark, Vertx, Netty, Akka, etc.? Not to mention the Java standard library with it's new time package, and java.util.concurrent, and many more.

> Better to not have generics than to have generics that are bodged into the language like they were in Java.

Strawman fallacy. Not to mention that generics in Java are not botched, they made a tradeoff and it paid off quite well, just look at the number of existing JVM languages. That beings said, there is work being done to improve generics in Java even more.

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

#240

Post by throwawaymath »

droithomme wrote: post #59
Crinus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Go and the Go logo are trademarked, see the responses in the linked post (use private mode if Google asks for login).

Thanks. I read further along in the linked post and found this comment by Rob Pike, one of Go's chief developers: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/6dKNSN0M_kg/dMCQ... > The name Go is not trademarked by Google, at least as a programming language trademark. There are other things Google makes called Go (an interesting signal on its own) and they might be trademarked, but Go the language is not a trademark.…

I'm not certain, but I think that page is wrong. I searched the USPTO database of trademarks for "Golang" and nothing was picked up: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4809%3Ax...

I'm not confident I'm correct only because it seems unlikely Google would have a page listing trademarks it doesn't actually own. That being said, I'm pretty sure there's no other place to search for trademarks.

I also don't think there is actually a trademark on the term "Go" based on this USPTO search: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4809%3Ax.... But admittedly I've only looked through five or six pages; using the option to search for an exact term doesn't seem to cut down the search results at all.

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