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

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

#111

Post by vezzy-fnord »

What made Go click for me is a simple realization: it's a language made by systems people, not by PL researchers.

Everything makes sense after that. The language in isolation is boring and perhaps even anachronistic: a modern ALGOL dialect with first-class green threads.

But as many people have said, the tooling and the libraries are simply top-notch. This is unsurprising: the people behind Go all have experience with things such as Research Unix, Plan 9 and just infrastructure in general. They've been instrumental in shaping up the lower level workings of our present systems, so they're intimately aware of those aspects. 9P, Acme, rio, the Acid debugger, the Plan 9 compiler collection... among other tools, reflect that their brilliance is in engineering rather than science.

But more importantly: these people are experts in managing complexity and integrating things. Thus, in isolation, Go's components look bland and uninteresting. Cumulatively, they form a unique experience. Hence why Go has such a strong culture of "pragmatism" that a lot of PL geeks scoff at.

So I've pretty much stopped thinking of Go the language, but rather Go the toolchain.

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

#112

Post by NateDad »

frou_dh wrote: post #49

Anyone know if Kernighan has written a lot of Go code himself, or is he onboard more for his technical writing skills? (There's the Bell Labs connection of course)

He and Rob Pike have written a few books together, that's likely the main connection.

I follow the Go community fairly closely and hadn't heard of Kernighan in connection with Go, but he may also not be advertising his use of it.

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

#113

Post by zaphar »

frou_dh wrote: post #49

Anyone know if Kernighan has written a lot of Go code himself, or is he onboard more for his technical writing skills? (There's the Bell Labs connection of course)

Kernighan is one of the core authors of the language. So I'd say it's for more than just his technical writing skills.

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

#114

Post by osw »

zaphar wrote: post #113
frou_dh wrote: post #49

Anyone know if Kernighan has written a lot of Go code himself, or is he onboard more for his technical writing skills? (There's the Bell Labs connection of course)

Kernighan is one of the core authors of the language. So I'd say it's for more than just his technical writing skills.

The main authors are Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer, Kernighan knows Ken since the 70s and Rob knows both of them since the 80s.

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

#116

Post by WorldWideWayne »

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.

Regardless of how I feel about Go as a language... I don't trust Google to perform well as the steward. It may be open source, but that means nothing if people stop working on it.

If it doesn't become popular, I think they will just let it die. If they start trying to make it popular, I think there will be a big push back from the great unwashed masses of people who want obvious features and then it will die. Only time will tell.

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

#117

Post by frou_dh »

zaphar wrote: post #113
frou_dh wrote: post #49

Anyone know if Kernighan has written a lot of Go code himself, or is he onboard more for his technical writing skills? (There's the Bell Labs connection of course)

Kernighan is one of the core authors of the language. So I'd say it's for more than just his technical writing skills.

No he isn't. Thompson gets slighted the same way by everyone thinking K&R _created_ C, when that was T&R.

They may all be greybeards but they are in fact distinct people!

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

#118

Post by chwahoo »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #116
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.

Regardless of how I feel about Go as a language... I don't trust Google to perform well as the steward. It may be open source, but that means nothing if people stop working on it. If it doesn't become popular, I think they will just let it die. If they start trying to make it popular, I think there will be a big push back from the great unwashed masses of people who want obvious features and then it will die. Only ti…

Who's the steward of your language of choice?

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

#119

Post by matthewmacleod »

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 think it's rather the height of hubris to accuse your contemporaries of being "ignorant" because they disagree with your assessment of this particular tool.

Go is an interesting shift in language design, basically discarding many modern trends and techniques and returning to a much simpler paradigm. It's a totally valid approach with lots of merit — complexity can be a killer. In addition, the concurrency primitives, decent stdlib and tooling make Go pretty great to use in some respects. It's likely to be well-supported for a long time and is a suitable tool for many tasks.

On the flipside, using it often feels like a bit of a slog. Error handling is simple (good) but repetitive (bad). Keeping generics out of the language avoids complexity (good) but results in repetitive and awkward code (bad). Lack of features like pattern matching and higher-order functions makes some code irritatingly tedious to read and write. And so on.

Point is, it's perfectly valid to look at these decisions and say "I don't like Go because it is missing these features", as much as it's valid to say "The simplicity of Go is a useful feature". Ignorance is not a prerequisite for disagreement.

So please have some respect for opinions which differ from your own, and think about offering something a little more constructive than insults.

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

#120

Post by anon1385 »

jbooth wrote: post #62
microtonal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the end people realize you can actually build things up without paying this complexity tax with simpler languages. This is why languages like Go succeed. Of course, you pay the tax somewhere else and that is code duplication. You see this in Go due to the lack of generics, which often results in duplication of code for different types or reliance on reflection (which is slower and can lead to runtime errors). This…

Yeah, but aside from the singular issue of generics (which are not exactly cutting edge), I can't think of a single 'advanced' feature that would add nearly enough utility to pay for its additional complexity. Everyone who shows up complaining about how it isn't "moving forward" by embracing features of high complexity and dubious utility is really missing the point IMO.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billi...
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