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Rob Pike interview

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Re: Rob Pike interview

#41

Post by k__ »

cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

"anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter."

This is quite funny.

I remember when Go was released its creators were all like "GC is good enough now" and then Rust came around the corner blowing that whole premise out of the window.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#42

Post by bfrog »

gorgoiler wrote: post #11

Go is the language that made me realize I’m not much of a production quality software engineer. Normally I would be quite happy riffing with ideas in Ruby or Python, and just running my code and iterating trying to figure out what to do. When I tried this in Go, every time I wanted to change the shape of my code to try doing things slightly differently I had to do a lot of work to get the code to compile again. I fee…

Liking Go has nothing to do with being a quality software engineer. Go itself is probably the least software engineering friendly language out there. The goal of a computer language is to express your thoughts and instructions into something a machine can understand. Full stop. Go is absolutely terrible at letting you the human express what you want the machine to do. It has compile time type checks, but then fails to provide the hatches needed to work with types sanely. It has the ability to call out to large bodies of C code, but not without significant costs. It compiles fast, which is good, because your going to write a lot more code to do the same things you'd do in other languages, even other compiled languages.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#43

Post by cletus »

floren wrote: post #35
cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

> Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Yeah, Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan definitely lacked experience in C and systems programming.

AFAIK Brian Kernighan was never involved with the development of Go. He just likes to try new things and wrote a book about it.

Rob Pike is probably most famous for his involvement in Plan9 (prior to this). I honestly don't know what this experience entailed.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#44

Post by bfrog »

jpgvm wrote: post #12
DevopsQuestions wrote: post #7

What are the chances of Rust or another language coming to the fore for cloud infra?

Reasonably high. There is a good deal of frustration with Go from experienced programmers that worked with it for several years and grew tired of the tedium involved. Rust has some obstacles to overcome to supplant Go on a wider scale though. Namely compile time and learning curve - especially in relation to concurrency and async which are key features to replacing Go as it's main draw is it's green runtime.

Go has no expressiveness to it. You end up either with a large pile of copy pasted code, code generators, or massively error prone runtime introspection. Go blows up the entire idea of Don't Repeat Yourself. The language actively encourages it.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#45

Post by kjksf »

rootsudo wrote: post #20

Really? Outside Google, I'm not aware of major orgs that use GO. I see the same .net C# stack, python, Ruby...... Java and PHP.

How hard are you looking?

Facebook, Dropbox, Uber, Apple and literally thousands of other companies, big and small, use Go.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#47

Post by zozbot234 »

k__ wrote: post #41
cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

"anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter." This is quite funny. I remember when Go was released its creators were all like "GC is good enough now" and then Rust came around the corner blowing that whole premise out of the window.

Rust used to be a GC-based language too - very similar to Go in fact. They didn't abandon GC until sometime prior to the 1.0 release, well after Go first came out.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#48

Post by throwaway894345 »

jpgvm wrote: post #12
DevopsQuestions wrote: post #7

What are the chances of Rust or another language coming to the fore for cloud infra?

Reasonably high. There is a good deal of frustration with Go from experienced programmers that worked with it for several years and grew tired of the tedium involved. Rust has some obstacles to overcome to supplant Go on a wider scale though. Namely compile time and learning curve - especially in relation to concurrency and async which are key features to replacing Go as it's main draw is it's green runtime.

I'm not seeing that. It seems like there's lots of enthusiasm to use Rust, but that people can't justify choosing it over Go probably because Rust is quite a lot more tedious than Go and its strong performance and correctness guarantees aren't worth the tradeoff for very many applications. I'm hopeful that things like rust-analyzer will help close that gap, but I don't think it will ever completely close much less reverse.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#49

Post by streetcat1 »

DevopsQuestions wrote: post #7

What are the chances of Rust or another language coming to the fore for cloud infra?

The fight is not technical but political / business-oriented.

Each language is a much more than its syntax. It is a complete ecosystem with network effects.

Rust can overcome go, if it would provide a lot of open source libraries, as well as growing number of programmers.

To do that, it would need the backing of big tech (e.g. MS), that have a big budget to evangelize it.

In any rate, the choice of language today is completely meaningless, since you can wrap anything in a container, and put a GRPC interface on top of it.

So the choice of lang should be based on the libraries for the task at hand and not on the lang itself.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#50

Post by [deleted] »

cletus wrote: post #43
floren wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Yeah, Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan definitely lacked experience in C and systems programming.

AFAIK Brian Kernighan was never involved with the development of Go. He just likes to try new things and wrote a book about it. Rob Pike is probably most famous for his involvement in Plan9 (prior to this). I honestly don't know what this experience entailed.

[deleted]
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