Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
#2This mistake happens a lot: Go is not a "Google" language in the sense of corporate ownership. Development is sponsored by Google, but control is left in the community.
This is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Swift which is controlled by Apple, which is not necessarily a bad thing depending on your perspective.
Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
#3This mistake happens a lot: Go is not a "Google" language in the sense of corporate ownership. Development is sponsored by Google, but control is left in the community. This is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Swift which is controlled by Apple, which is not necessarily a bad thing depending on your perspective.
Absolutely spot on, but it's damn near impossible talking to a non-programmer about Go without biting your tongue every time you almost say 'Google'
Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
#4This article seems to be written for non-programmers.
Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
#5I see this and I just think of the Joe Armstrong post on education.
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07...
So many languages to choose from; so much fragmentation while we are already experiencing a shortage of developers.
I appreciate that Apple made something available other than Objective-C. I've done my share of it and personally I don't think it's a bad language, but the foreign syntax makes it less approachable to some. The sandbox mode in Xcode with Swift is great too.
I just wish that instead of suffering from "Not Invented Here" syndrome that they would have chosen something that already exists. Ruby, Python, Lua, Scala, Clojure. There are so many choices, can't at least one fit the bill?
Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
#6No mention of Rust, which I think ought to have been a natural addition to the article?
Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
#7Syntax is by far the least interesting thing about any new programming language, but they spend paragraphs talking about braces and semicolons.
And the conclusions are bizarre and uninformed:
> When Sun rolled out Java in 1995, everyone thought it would be a dandy tool for building browser applets that made images dance, yet its destiny was mostly server-side.
Uhhh... what? Sun pushed for Java for _everything_, and they were hugely successful in doing so.
> For developers, then, choosing a language is like choosing citizenship in a country. You’re not only buying into syntax and semantics. You’re buying into economics and culture, the rules that shape how you earn your livelihood and the forces that channel your hopes and dreams.
Learning a language is nothing like choosing citizenship. You can learn and use many languages in parallel. Most programmers do.
This article is not good.
Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
#8This mistake happens a lot: Go is not a "Google" language in the sense of corporate ownership. Development is sponsored by Google, but control is left in the community. This is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Swift which is controlled by Apple, which is not necessarily a bad thing depending on your perspective.
The article doesn't say that.
However, Go did originate at Google and the points the article makes about it having been designed to solve specific problems at Google are all true. It was not originally intended to be a widely-used general-purpose language: it just happened to catch on after it was released publicly.
Furthermore, the most significant contributors to the language design and its evolution (Rob Pike, Russ Cox, Andrew Gerrand, Brad Fitzpatrick, etc.) are all employed by Google.
It's not at all unfair or misleading to call it "Google's" in the way the article does.
Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
#9 > Google’s Go is structured to simplify the work of making
> code run “concurrently,” smoothing the way for
> programmers to create and juggle portions of a program
> that execute simultaneously — and thus take full
> advantage of today’s multicore chips and multiprocessor
> machines.
Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder
#10> Google’s Go is structured to simplify the work of making > code run “concurrently,” smoothing the way for > programmers to create and juggle portions of a program > that execute simultaneously — and thus take full > advantage of today’s multicore chips and multiprocessor > machines. It's a while since I last checked out Go but I thought Goroutines were coroutines and therefore confined to a single core. Does Go pro…
Go has supported "true" concurrency (distributing goroutines across cores) since at least version 1.0, and probably earlier.