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Rob Pike interview

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Re: Rob Pike interview

#81

Post by takeda »

bfrog wrote: post #42
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 t…

Yeah the type system is absolutely horrid. Just try to use any other type size than int, int64, float64 then you will be in a lot of pain casting every time you use them.

It's so silly for example that math.Min/Max only works on float64, it won't work with float32 without casting, or integers (although for ints is highly discouraged, because casting to float could cause you to get a different number, it is encouraged to just do if statement yourself)

It is a horrible language, only popular because it came from Google. It's biggest benefit was that it supposed to be easy to pick up, but it also demonstrates that the simplicity doesn't help at all with a significant code base, you still have to spend the same amount of time to learn it as in any other language.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#82

Post by jtakkala »

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.

I've said this before, but even back in early 2014 Rob Pike had said that he regretted the term "systems programming" because people misunderstood him to mean it as a language for writing operating systems, when what he meant was a language for writing servers, although that later evolved to cloud infrastructure.

He answers this at 6:50 here, https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Pa...

Re: Rob Pike interview

#83

Post by troutwine »

zozbot234 wrote: post #40
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…

> 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. Ha. Try Rust if you like a challenge: at least you will get outstanding compiler diagnostics while refactoring, and far better performance as an end result.

Having done a fair bit of work in both languages I find Rust's type system here is much more of a help. I've got a clear sense of where things have gone sideways in Rust, even if that clear sense can sometimes feel like a long hike to get through. Go leaves me constantly wondering if I remembered to implement all the right functions for this or that interface, among concerns put elsewhere in this thread by others.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#84

Post by mgummelt »

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…

> 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.

What exactly do you mean by systems programming? Many successful databases (Cassandra, Kafka, ElasticSearch) are built on the JVM.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#85

Post by nappy-doo »

centimeter wrote: post #68
nappy-doo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

use a better editor. VSCode, vim with vimgo, emacs with whatever those apes use.

I shouldn't need an industrial-strength editing engine to efficiently express my ideas. (And don't, if I'm using a nice expressive language.)

ever written Java?

Re: Rob Pike interview

#86

Post by mav3rick »

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.

If you didn't know you should have clarified before making such sweeping statements. Who knew writing an OS would count as systems programming experience.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#88

Post by dehrmann »

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…

> It attracted Python refugees

Honest question: other than parallelism and performance, what are the main reasons someone would switch from Python to Go?

Re: Rob Pike interview

#89

Post by acdha »

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…

I’m not sure whether this is the same level of big problem but I wish that they’d taken C’s other major failure more seriously and required error handling. Every Go-based tool that I use has at some point failed because an error was ignored. That necessarily doesn’t mean exceptions — simply having the compiler fail like it does for an unused import for every case where an error is assigned but not subsequently accessed would be sufficient.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#90

Post by seneca »

cletus wrote: post #73
seneca wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of nitpicks. > More to the point, users of [Kubernetes] don't really use Go as a result, right? Yeah, they do actually. The vast majority of tooling in the Kubernetes space is also written in Go. I don't know about etcd. > The small one is the lack of IDE support. You don't need to write an IDE. You just need to have sufficient integration into Jetbrains IDEs (at a minimum). I might be missing what you're sa…

> I might be missing what you're saying here, but Goland has been around for a decent while now, and the full IntelliJ plugin has as well. Right. That's true now (and, like you say, has been for some times) but was not the case for years. I was responding to this point in the interview talking about initial development, not the current state of the world, just to clarify.

Yep, that makes more sense. I was a vimgo user before Goland was available, and I found it to be good enough, but it definitely wasn't something that would attract new users.
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