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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”

#301

Post by mattnewton »

0815test wrote: post #216
mattnewton wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the comparison to Haskell or Ocaml; those languages are not C like and have a much different philosophy on the responsibilities of the language and type system.

Haskell is not C like? You can write Haskell with curly brackets and semicolons, just like Go! I rest my case. No, but seriously, you didn't get what I was saying there. The whole reason Go might be of interest is that it is loosely C-like in a way that Haskell and Ocaml are not.

That true, and I still don’t get what you are saying here. In my mind, they are different languages which appeal to different developers and fit with different requirements. I don’t see it as an alternative to Haskell any more than any Turing-complete language is technically an alternative.

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

#302

Post by beachy »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #278

> Successful languages pay attention to what people want, but to change the language according to what most people want is, I believe, a recipe for chaos and incoherence. I believe that every successful language must have a coherent vision that is shared by a relatively small group of people. I'm continually surprised that more of the greater, vocal community does not grok this.

Fred Brooks said it well in the Mythical Man Month:

"the sheer number of minds to be coordinated affects the cost of the effort, for a major part of the cost is communication and correcting the ill effects of miscommunication (system debugging). This, too, suggests that one wants the system to be built by as few minds as possible."

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

#303

Post by ggm »

Go is a Thompson/Pike language and neither suffer fools gladly. I've had only the briefest, AUUG and related unix conference type interaction with either and claim no special privilege or insight but I do know people who worked with them in a deeper sense, and I spoke to them in times past about both people (and Ritche)

If they decide on their own formidable intellect they want something they do it, and if they can be convinced by others intellect they may do it, but simply wanting it is not enough to get over their bar.

Pike is more curt. But I think both of them stand by a principle: Don't waste our time.

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

#304

Post by smt88 »

geodel wrote: post #229
nurettin wrote: post #72

Like it or not, Google is probably paying around a million $$ a year to keep senior full-time developers around that want to work on the language. That could be used as a benchmark to calculate how much of an investment is required to have a healthy development cycle. If a community-maintained fork is created, it would need time and monetary investment similar to what google is doing just to maintain and develop non-…

I read somewhere on mailing list that there are about ~30 people inside Google working full time on Go. And that is different from engineers working on products built using Go. With infrastructure cost added it would be easily $10 million a year. So these Linkedin/Twitter style thought leaders demanding some kinda OpenGo foundation need to ask if they have capacity to raise this amount consistently over years to star…

A foundation doesn't need to replace all the corporate money. At minimum, it's a guarantee that the language will be maintained if/when the corporate entity loses interest. Maintaining a language is not nearly as cumbersome as improving it.

At best, a foundation is also going to provide more neutral governance, as well as a nexus for multiple corporations to work on the language together. Other companies are more likely to adopt Go if they see it as not just a Google project.

I personally don't care whether my favorite languages have a foundation, as long as they're used for large projects by large companies. That alone is a good guarantee that they'll stick around.

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

#305

Post by zemo »

joemi wrote: post #248
zemo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language is that actually true or is that true of a vocal minority? I've been using Go since 2011 and I'm perfectly happy that it's Google's language; I'm happy to mooch off of their investments. In my seven-plus years of using Go I have never encountered a Go programmer in real life that is actually mad about this.

I think the "everyone" in that statement refers to those who are upset. It probably could have been more accurately phrased as "People are upset that Go is Google's language..." As to your not encountering a Go programmer who's mad about this, I think that's because you're considering people who are already programming in Go. I suspect people who care never actually start using Go because of their thoughts on Google'…

> I think that's because you're considering people who are already programming in Go

um I talk to a lot of programmers that don't use Go. Most that don't use it decide not to use it because of either the type system ("it's not safe/expressive enough") or the garbage collector. I've never talked to someone that said "Go is technically good and I think it would be a good tool but I won't use it because of Google".

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

#306

Post by abtinf »

viraptor wrote: post #284
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #278

> Successful languages pay attention to what people want, but to change the language according to what most people want is, I believe, a recipe for chaos and incoherence. I believe that every successful language must have a coherent vision that is shared by a relatively small group of people. I'm continually surprised that more of the greater, vocal community does not grok this.

Whether I grok this or not doesn't really influence the behaviour. Option 1: to change the language I need to say what I want. Option 2: to change the language I need to influence the small group of people enough... by saying what I want.

Option 3: you write a coherent proposal of a quality comparable to those written by the committers and work with them to implement it, possibly becoming a committer yourself and getting hired by google in the process.

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

#307

Post by emmelaich »

objektif wrote: post #273
joemi wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from the post: > There was no mandate or suggestion from Google management or executives that Google should develop a programming language. For many years, including well after the open source release, I doubt any Google executives had more than a vague awareness of the existence of Go

That is a ver very strong assumption. Just because Google did not explicitly have a ‘GO’ team does not mean they did not support it. I assume Google became aware of it the moment their employees started using it for something useful. People have bosses who have bosses. At whoch point they decided to let their employees continue working on it.

Go exists because Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and others are allowed the latitude to make it.

You can be sure that whatever they do gets a high profile without it in any way being "supported" or "official"

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

#308

Post by bassman9000 »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #278

> Successful languages pay attention to what people want, but to change the language according to what most people want is, I believe, a recipe for chaos and incoherence. I believe that every successful language must have a coherent vision that is shared by a relatively small group of people. I'm continually surprised that more of the greater, vocal community does not grok this.

The whole paragraph is worth reading

If a language is to change over time, this specification or implementation must change. Somebody has to decide how changes will be made. All successful languages have a small set of people who make the final decisions. Many people will provide input to this decision, but no successful language--indeed, no successful free software project of any sort--is a democracy. Successful languages pay attention to what people want, but to change the language according to what most people want is, I believe, a recipe for chaos and incoherence. I believe that every successful language must have a coherent vision that is shared by a relatively small group of people.

And again

Many people will provide input to this decision, but no successful language--indeed, no successful free software project of any sort--is a democracy.

On point.

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

#309

Post by kragen »

vorg wrote: post #289
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…

> PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml, Lua Many of those languages came out in the 1990's when the big corporates were busy pushing visual 4GL's to replace programming languages. But programmers prefered to write a Perl ten-liner rather than fire up a visual environment, click on some toolbars to place some widgets on a form, link in the data files using the right-click form, wait while the OS thrashes the hard drive as it…

My memory of that time is pretty different.

I worked as a programmer in the 1990s, when I got paid to write things in C, C++, Perl, Khoros (I guess that's a "visual 4GL"?), IDL (the array language), VB, SQL, INFORMIX's horrible forms thing (which was not especially "visual"), sh, csh (not my fault), and occasionally Tcl. It's true that PHP, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml, and Lua came out in the 1990s (Python is from 1990, so arguably the 1980s), but they became widely used in the 2000s. In fact, even Perl was considered kind of déclassé until these "lightweight languages" took over the world, and then Perl became déclassé again after being eclipsed by Python, Ruby, and most surprisingly, JS.

(OCaml is not a "lightweight language" and is not like the others, and consequently never became popular.)

I don't recognize your description as corresponding to any events I remember. Sun was pushing Java. Microsoft was pushing C++, then Java, and then when Sun sued them, C#. Apple wasn't pushing much of anything until they bought NeXT, and then they started pushing Objective-C. As far as I know Oracle was pushing PL/SQL and cisco was pushing bletcherous IOS commands. Microsoft was pushing VB, which sort of resembles what you're saying, but VB wasn't a 4GL (the language was just 1960s Basic minus line numbers and plus subroutine arguments) and was actually spectacularly successful at what it did; it just wasn't good at making web sites. Borland was pushing Delphi. I guess in a way Microsoft was pushing Access? Are you thinking of Microsoft Access?

Maybe you were thinking of PowerBuilder? It was spectacularly successful at what it did, too (again, not building websites), and it was a visual 4GL, but it was being pushed by Powersoft, not a big corporate, until (Wikipedia tells me) Sybase bought it for 0.9 Instagrams in 1995. I never saw anybody use PowerBuilder but I didn't use Microsoft Windows a lot.

When you say, "they soon built their own", do you mean VBA and PowerShell, or what?

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

#310

Post by diminoten »

> I count 59 Googlers on the committers list and 51 non-Googlers. So while Google is the majority, it's not an overwhelming one. Again, this can't be what it means to say that Go is Google's language.

Wait, why not? The majority of people in control of what Go is work at Google. Seems like a pretty clear definition to me.

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