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

The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan

amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 264 posts

Re: The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan

#41

Post by dagw »

tempodox wrote: post #25

In my personal view, I find it disappointing that someone like Brian Kernighan, as a co-author of C, only got as far as Go. I would have loved it much more to see him working on a language like Rust, that actually seems to point to the future of programming languages (or does its best at it), while Go looks like a stopgap and a dead end right from the beginning. Go seems a fine piece of engineering in so far as it di…

C wasn't a particularly groundbreaking or future building language either. It basically just took a bunch of well known features from some popular languages at the time and packaged them together in a way that directly made it easier for Ritchie to solve the problem he was working on at the time (developing and porting Unix).

So as such Go and C have much in common.

edit: Originally wrote Kernighan instead of Ritchie. Kernighan as far as I know had nothing to do with the design or creation of C.

Re: The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan

#43

Post by aap_ »

tempodox wrote: post #25

In my personal view, I find it disappointing that someone like Brian Kernighan, as a co-author of C, only got as far as Go. I would have loved it much more to see him working on a language like Rust, that actually seems to point to the future of programming languages (or does its best at it), while Go looks like a stopgap and a dead end right from the beginning. Go seems a fine piece of engineering in so far as it di…

Brian is not the co-author of C, he wrote most of K&R however.

Re: The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan

#44

Post by jonstokes »

tempodox wrote: post #25

In my personal view, I find it disappointing that someone like Brian Kernighan, as a co-author of C, only got as far as Go. I would have loved it much more to see him working on a language like Rust, that actually seems to point to the future of programming languages (or does its best at it), while Go looks like a stopgap and a dead end right from the beginning. Go seems a fine piece of engineering in so far as it di…

I think this comment is awesome and makes total sense if you read it in Comic Book Guy voice.

Actually, I think Comic Book Guy voice works for so many of the comments that get downvoted on HN. There should be set of tags that mods can put around a comment to signify "relevant and humorous if read with Comic Book Guy voice", so that the community doesn't miss out on comedy gold.

Re: The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan

#45

Post by cdnsteve »

wsloth514 wrote: post #18

It's Brian Kernighan, enough said. I am sold.

I actually have to say I wasn't familiar with this author having never spent time in C. After some Googling I'm excited to see he's fellow Canadian and looks to be a pioneer in computing as well. It also seems he's worked with Rob Pike, another fellow Canadian :)

Re: The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan

#46

Post by CatDevURandom »

sesteel wrote: post #26

Go, with its simplicity, is a gift from the generation of masters to today's professionals, but many of today's professionals appear too ignorant to see the wisdom of the language. It used to drive me crazy when I would read negative comments in r/programming and HN, but I don't even pay attention to the negative comments anymore. The adoption is far better than I was afraid it was going to be.

I agree. And not for nothing, I'm shipping production code, at a real company, with real customers, with real revenue (250m+).

Here's the deal -- all programming languages are just tools. Go's great because it's small enough to keep in your head, and simple. It's fast. It promotes composition. And it has sane concurrency. And quite honestly, I am more productive for the things Go left out then it includes. That's not to say Go is a perfect (e.g. a 'real' debugger option), and it doesn't have to be. If you love Rust, or Ruby, or whatever, great. The programming language landscape is not a zero sum game.

tl;dr Go's a fine tool to get stuff done for a large set of problem domains.

Re: The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan

#47

Post by tempodox »

yiyus wrote: post #40
tempodox wrote: post #25

In my personal view, I find it disappointing that someone like Brian Kernighan, as a co-author of C, only got as far as Go. I would have loved it much more to see him working on a language like Rust, that actually seems to point to the future of programming languages (or does its best at it), while Go looks like a stopgap and a dead end right from the beginning. Go seems a fine piece of engineering in so far as it di…

In my personal view, I find terribly arrogant to find disappointing how far Brian Kernighan has got. Even only what he has done between C and Go is more than most successful careers.

Fair enough.

Re: The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan

#48

Post by baldfat »

aros wrote: post #31
sesteel wrote: post #26

Go, with its simplicity, is a gift from the generation of masters to today's professionals, but many of today's professionals appear too ignorant to see the wisdom of the language. It used to drive me crazy when I would read negative comments in r/programming and HN, but I don't even pay attention to the negative comments anymore. The adoption is far better than I was afraid it was going to be.

Can you please elaborate on the "wisdom of the language" and why you feel it's necessary to ignore all criticism?

> ignore all criticism?

I don't feel like they ignored them they are basically saying they think they have a better solution.

Post reply on HN