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Featherweight Go

arxiv.org

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Re: Featherweight Go

#81

Post by fauigerzigerk »

meddlepal wrote: post #71
eeh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting all new typed languages have generics? What makes you so sure there isn't room in the design space for a typed language without generics? As much as I like generics, Go's popularity is a success: programmers have spoken, and they value other things more than generics. Hindsight is 20/20, and even this isn't a commitment to introduce generics in Go.

Go is popular because Google enjoys shoving it down our throats not because it is a particularly good language. Not saying it is a bad language, but it really helps that Go had Google's blessing.

Strange. I get the impression that Google's support for Go is rather half hearted.

Or perhaps Google has many hearts and no one knows exactly how many or where they are at any given point in time :-)

Re: Featherweight Go

#82

Post by pjmlp »

icholy wrote: post #65
pjmlp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Both its main influences, Oberon-2 and Limbo had zero traction on the market, and Limbo not only is quite close to Go, it had an whole OS full of the Plan 9 ideas to come along, yet it failed on the market. Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem. > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three proble…

> Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Why isn't Dart seeing the same type of success?

Because it was dropped on the floor by the Chrome team, which lead to the original team leaving Google, if they had shipped Dartium the outcome would be much different.

Re: Featherweight Go

#83

Post by pjmlp »

jstarks wrote: post #67
pjmlp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Both its main influences, Oberon-2 and Limbo had zero traction on the market, and Limbo not only is quite close to Go, it had an whole OS full of the Plan 9 ideas to come along, yet it failed on the market. Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem. > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three proble…

Is Dart's lack of popularity in spite of its author's employer, then?

Because it was dropped on the floor by the Chrome team, which lead to the original team leaving Google.

Original Go team did not suffer from this.

Re: Featherweight Go

#84

Post by pjmlp »

etse wrote: post #76
pjmlp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, they acknowledged it was a mistake not to consider them. > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three problems to fix in the language. https://blog.golang.org/why-generics By the way, they could have gone to 1974 (CLU), 1973 (ML), 1983 (Ada), 1986 (Eiffel), 1988 (Modula-3), 1990 (Sather & BETA), 1998 (C++), 2007 (D), 2009 (Java & Delphi). These are just the most…

They weren't convinced at the time. Now they feel compelled to act. How is this political?

They have been saying that for years now. Yet nothing to show other than an half finished code repository.

Re: Featherweight Go

#85

Post by pjmlp »

throwaway34241 wrote: post #70
pjmlp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, they acknowledged it was a mistake not to consider them. > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three problems to fix in the language. https://blog.golang.org/why-generics By the way, they could have gone to 1974 (CLU), 1973 (ML), 1983 (Ada), 1986 (Eiffel), 1988 (Modula-3), 1990 (Sather & BETA), 1998 (C++), 2007 (D), 2009 (Java & Delphi). These are just the most…

You're commenting on a paper by expert programming language theorists describing a design that is both complex and (in some aspects) novel. Almost certainly an element of getting these people to work on it is Go's existing popularity, it's mentioned in the second sentence of the paper. If I understand you right, you are suggesting that instead of doing what they are doing now, they should have just used an existing d…

Yes, right from the beginning. Java isn't the only language to chose from.

Re: Featherweight Go

#86

Post by pjmlp »

baby wrote: post #78
pjmlp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Both its main influences, Oberon-2 and Limbo had zero traction on the market, and Limbo not only is quite close to Go, it had an whole OS full of the Plan 9 ideas to come along, yet it failed on the market. Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem. > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three proble…

> Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem. That's from people who complain because they want Golang to be like Java

It is more people that don't want Go be a plain Limbo remake.

Re: Featherweight Go

#87

Post by dcu »

pjmlp wrote: post #52
eeh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting all new typed languages have generics? What makes you so sure there isn't room in the design space for a typed language without generics? As much as I like generics, Go's popularity is a success: programmers have spoken, and they value other things more than generics. Hindsight is 20/20, and even this isn't a commitment to introduce generics in Go.

Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Both its main influences, Oberon-2 and Limbo had zero traction on the market, and Limbo not only is quite close to Go, it had an whole OS full of the Plan 9 ideas to come along, yet it failed on the market. Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem. > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three proble…

I think Go is popular because of its simplicity and fantastic standard library.

It can also feel sometimes like a dynamic language which has attracted people from ruby, python, JS, etc... communities.

You say there's no place for it in the 21st century, yet it already has a place and it doesn't really need generics to continue living.

Re: Featherweight Go

#88

Post by kyrra »

ainar-g wrote: post #26

From the conclusion: Featherweight Go is restricted to a tiny subset of Go. We plan a model of other important features such as assignments, arrays, slices, and packages, which we will dub Bantamweight Go; and a model of Go’s innovative concurrency mechanism based on “goroutines” and message passing, which we will dub Cruiserweight Go. Love the naming!

> Featherweight Go is restricted to a tiny subset of Go. We plan a model of other important features such as assignments, arrays, slices, and packages, which we will dub Bantamweight Go; and a model of Go’s innovative concurrency mechanism based on “goroutines” and message passing, which we will dub Cruiserweight Go.

Required better for mobile.

Re: Featherweight Go

#89

Post by jhoechtl »

4ad wrote: post #16
leetrout wrote: post #13

Info on the current implementation of generics in Go how to tryout the generics branch parhamn mentions is available at https://blog.tempus-ex.com/generics-in-go-how-they-work-and-...

That's from the previous generics proposal, substantially different from this one.

This is the intersting discussion. What of the two proposals will receive the Go authors blessing? Isn't the arxiv version just a Guerilla attempt?

Re: Featherweight Go

#90

Post by lazyjones »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #80
lazyjones wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Closer to logic. There is a straightforward rewrite into prolog if you want a program. Journal papers usually don't get rewritten into Prolog or fed into proof assistants. They're read by human beings. I've long suspected (and colleagues used to "joke" about it) that excessive use of mathematical notation is just employed to impress and/or confuse peer reviewers into just accepting the paper instead of trying to co…

Stop trying to justify your own ignorance. The sequent calculus is great—I am far from an expert and for many papers I can skip the text at first, read the sequents, and then just go back to the prose only if I have specific questions. No prolog conversion needed. As programers, we should be able to read , not just write, formal languages, and appreciate the value of the precision they provide.

> Stop trying to justify your own ignorance.

I am not ignorant. I tried to rationalize this in the beginning too. It's just hostile towards the reader.

> As programers, we should be able to read, not just write, formal languages, and appreciate the value of the precision they provide.

We should also be able to see where they are appropriate and where not.

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