Go is Google's language, not ours • Hacker News Board

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#111

Post by TylerE » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:33 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #107

TylerE wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t most of the top Haskell devs been on the Microsoft payroll for years and years?

SPJ is a Microsoft Research Cambridge employee, but as far as I know that doesn't give Microsoft Research (let alone Microsoft itself) any undue influence over the language's direction, they can't gatekeep or ram things into Haskell or GHC.

It would still be corporate sponsorship and not a true community effort though. Not having to work to pay bills makes it much easier to run a large project.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#112

Post by _ph_ » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:33 AM UTC

dis-sys wrote: post #36

majewsky wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Just fork the last freely-licensed Version then.

then start to use clean room process to reimplement all future bug fixes? nice!

Where comes the expectation from, that someone else fixes your problems for free? If you clone Go now, you get a robust codebase for free, and you could do any maintenance on your own (as a reasonably large organization)

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#113

Post by CraigAU » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:33 AM UTC

Rust is another choice ~

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#114

Post by piyush_soni » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:34 AM UTC

>> But Google is the gatekeeper for these community contributions; it alone decides what is and isn't accepted into Go.

So ... much like Linux where Linus is the gatekeeper, and he decides what goes in and what doesn't, and also abuses people while at it?

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#115

Post by CraigAU » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:34 AM UTC

Rust is your choice :)

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#116

Post by ggm » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:35 AM UTC

tamrix wrote: post #87

Golang solves a specific domain problem google has. They extended plan9s c compiler with some syntax Sugar for co routines and fixed some whacky c stuff then threw in some gc. There's new and innovated about golang. They just had to open source golang because they used the plan 9 c compiler which was open source.

A small group of programming language professionals with fifty+ years of shared experience developing compilers decided to keep on going with the language family they invented and extended.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#117

Post by Spearchucker » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:36 AM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #45

ncmncm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet. But we can hope. Ten years is a long time in this business.

Ten years is a very short time for a programming language. Python is decades old and hasn't hit its peak popularity yet. I don't know of a single mainstream language that has died, except for perhaps ColdFusion or ActionScript.

Depends on how you define death. There's ALGOL, SNOGOL, LOGO, Pascal, Visicalc, APL... They were all mainstream at a point, and they all still exist, but the userbase has become tiny.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#118

Post by ksec » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:36 AM UTC

cryptos wrote: post #24

Actually there are relatively few real (TM) open source projects driven by the community, at least if you look at important projects. Many open source projects are just commercial projects driven mainly by a single company. Look for example at Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, and Elasticsearch. They follow exactly the model described in the article. Technologies like these could have been developed by a community, too, but it…

If we look at the Top 10 programming languages, I think only Ruby is community driven that has very little cooperate backing. All the other languages are driven by one (Apple;Swift), or multiple, (Javascript, Java) cooperate sponsors.

I think the balance is hard, you will need lots of resources from Documentation, VM expertise, Library, etc.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#119

Post by Illniyar » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:37 AM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #101

Illniyar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his fear of google's stewardship of the language is the fear of what it'll do to the community around it.

Its incredibly unlikely that Google would take decisions for the language that would make it less effective at what it does.

No, but it's very likely that they'll make decisions that'll alienate the community and thereby cause it's ecosystem to lose more and more relevance. It has done that with other open source projects they stewarded.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#120

Post by masklinn » Wed, May 22, 2019, 7:38 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #111

masklinn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SPJ is a Microsoft Research Cambridge employee, but as far as I know that doesn't give Microsoft Research (let alone Microsoft itself) any undue influence over the language's direction, they can't gatekeep or ram things into Haskell or GHC.

It would still be corporate sponsorship and not a true community effort though. Not having to work to pay bills makes it much easier to run a large project.

Pretty sure SPJ does have to work to pay bills. It's just that they work for a research institution and can thus do part of their work in / on the project. In no small part because CS research was one of the use cases for creating Haskell.