Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Four years of Go

blog.golang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 202 posts

Re: Four years of Go

#31

Post by millstone »

enneff wrote: post #29
chetanahuja wrote: post #24

Looks like Go is succeeding more in the space where scripting languages like Python and Ruby are dominant and less in it's original intended space (systems programming). Rob Pike has written about it too. I wonder if they see this as an opportunity missed or unexpected boon.

We definitely made a mistake at launch using the term "systems programming", because people automatically think of operating systems. What we meant were the kind of systems we build at google. Some of the examples in the blog post are "systems programming" in the same sense. So we are pleased to see Go being used for the job it was designed for, but we are also happy to see that Go has a broader appeal.

You don't build operating systems at Google?

Re: Four years of Go

#32

Post by ihsw »

sitkack wrote: post #28
sergiotapia wrote: post #13

I'm betting on Go at the moment, using it to build some little libraries and writing some dummy apps to test the waters. Hopefully in 4 years when Golang developers are in demand, I have 4 years of experience under my belt. :)

Programming is now multi-language and multi-paradigm. It matters more what you can do and not what you can do it in. Being able to compose libraries and systems from parts is way more important than knowing a specific language.

Indeed, for example getting your brain wrapped around concurrency patterns in Go is very straightforward (especially since there is a plethora of documentation and examples).

These skills will transfer very well into other programming languages.

Re: Four years of Go

#33

Post by donutdan4114 »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #26
dmak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you go into detail on your experiences for Go compared to JS or Ruby?

Takes me about 10-20% longer to do trivial things in go than ruby, but the results are much faster and bigger refactorings are also much faster to complete (nice type system). The ability to really max your perf out in short amount of time is also delightful

Yea everything takes me longer to make, but you end up with a better, faster application.

Re: Four years of Go

#34

Post by enneff »

millstone wrote: post #31
enneff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely made a mistake at launch using the term "systems programming", because people automatically think of operating systems. What we meant were the kind of systems we build at google. Some of the examples in the blog post are "systems programming" in the same sense. So we are pleased to see Go being used for the job it was designed for, but we are also happy to see that Go has a broader appeal.

You don't build operating systems at Google?

Well, we have Android and ChromeOS, which are both Linux. While we do have a lot of people doing Linux kernel work, I'm not aware of any "green field" operating systems being built at Google. (Although I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong here.)

Most of the software we build at Google are server processes that talk to other server processes. Go was designed primarily for this role, but it is obviously useful for a lot more.

Re: Four years of Go

#35

Post by [deleted] »

ihsw wrote: post #32
sitkack wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is now multi-language and multi-paradigm. It matters more what you can do and not what you can do it in. Being able to compose libraries and systems from parts is way more important than knowing a specific language.

Indeed, for example getting your brain wrapped around concurrency patterns in Go is very straightforward (especially since there is a plethora of documentation and examples). These skills will transfer very well into other programming languages.

[deleted]

Re: Four years of Go

#36

Post by dbaupp »

enneff wrote: post #22
dbaupp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does, the point is "Go's ecosystem has developed really fast" but maybe a (hypothetical) better language developed in this day & age would've reached the same point in 2 years?

"A better language might do better" is not a very interesting point to make.

Neither is "A language released in the age of the internet gets adopted faster than languages before it".

Re: Four years of Go

#37

Post by chetanahuja »

enneff wrote: post #29
chetanahuja wrote: post #24

Looks like Go is succeeding more in the space where scripting languages like Python and Ruby are dominant and less in it's original intended space (systems programming). Rob Pike has written about it too. I wonder if they see this as an opportunity missed or unexpected boon.

We definitely made a mistake at launch using the term "systems programming", because people automatically think of operating systems. What we meant were the kind of systems we build at google. Some of the examples in the blog post are "systems programming" in the same sense. So we are pleased to see Go being used for the job it was designed for, but we are also happy to see that Go has a broader appeal.

Well, I would argue that there's a level between "db replication infrastructure" type projects and OS kernels. That is the space occupied by things like database engines (everything from BigTable and descendants to Oracle), distributed storage engines (GFS and descendants) etc. I don't think I've seen a project in Go that aims to deal with that level of "system-ness" yet. And I suspect I know the reasons (why, say, I wouldn't write the packetzoom protocol stack in Go) but I'd like to know more about whether to Go team thinks it made the right choices in language and runtime design for a systems language.

Re: Four years of Go

#38

Post by enneff »

dbaupp wrote: post #36
enneff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A better language might do better" is not a very interesting point to make.

Neither is "A language released in the age of the internet gets adopted faster than languages before it".

Isn't it?

Re: Four years of Go

#39

Post by chetanahuja »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #27
threeseed wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spectacular con job ? Are you joking ? There was and continues to remain NOTHING that compares to the Java platform.

I assume you mean in terms of hype? Java can do stuff and people use it which is fine. The con was that it was inherently portable and secure and can be used for client software. None of that is true. Today if someone told me that our new client interface was going to be java that person would be reassigned to a role where their awful judgement would not resurface. Java today is basically the slower edition of C++ wh…

Hmm.. I'm not a Java fan by any means but as it turns out that Java is now actually a very popular language for client side programming. Maybe one of the most popular client side[1] programming languages in existence today.

[1] http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Re: Four years of Go

#40

Post by enneff »

chetanahuja wrote: post #37
enneff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely made a mistake at launch using the term "systems programming", because people automatically think of operating systems. What we meant were the kind of systems we build at google. Some of the examples in the blog post are "systems programming" in the same sense. So we are pleased to see Go being used for the job it was designed for, but we are also happy to see that Go has a broader appeal.

Well, I would argue that there's a level between "db replication infrastructure" type projects and OS kernels. That is the space occupied by things like database engines (everything from BigTable and descendants to Oracle), distributed storage engines (GFS and descendants) etc. I don't think I've seen a project in Go that aims to deal with that level of "system-ness" yet. And I suspect I know the reasons (why, say, I…

There are a few Go databases mentioned in the blog post, and several more besides. Also there's weed-fs a distributed storage system (and at least one other whose name escapes me right now). I also think Go would be a great language for implementing a BigTable server.
Post reply on HN