Creating the Go Programming Language [audio] • Hacker News Board

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#111

Post by weberc2 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

gigatexal wrote: post #91

weberc2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was drawn to Go because it was the only language at the time (or the only one I came across) that allowed me to build and package software without learning a domain specific language and imperatively stitching together my own build system (looking at you, CMake and Gradle). Basically I want to focus on writing my program, not writing programs to build my program. Go let me run “go build”, and everything Just Worked…

I came to Go when modules had been released and found it much easier to understand than GOPATH style workflows. I guess to each their own. I agree, go build, and go distribution is so awesome.

I’m not opposed to modules; there are just some odd edge cases that have given me trouble; probably the error messaging just needs to be improved.

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#112

Post by fortran77 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #100

fortran77 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did C# have actual "advertising" outside of msdn publications? It came out in 2000 and I don't recall seeing C# ads. (Print publications were out then.) I picked it up early on and still use it (and F#) today. I've written a lot of custom desktop applications in it.

Yes, The C/C++ Users Journal, DrDobbs, PC World, and Computer Shopper run articles on it. It was actually released in 2001. Unless you are speaking about the alphas that MSFT Certified Partners had access to.

They ran articles, of course, but were there "advertisements?" These were publications writing about a major company's major new effort.

There's no advertising today, either. What happens is (for example) Rust/Mozilla foundation's people set out to make every thread on every popular forum about Rust.

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#113

Post by KibbutzDalia » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

dilyevsky wrote: post #34

pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being basically a copy of Limbo with Oberon-2 method syntax, although we are a bit further than 1992, to start with. And while at it, offering less features as Algol used to have.

Offering less features was literally their goal in which they succeeded

Fewer

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#114

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #112

pjmlp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, The C/C++ Users Journal, DrDobbs, PC World, and Computer Shopper run articles on it. It was actually released in 2001. Unless you are speaking about the alphas that MSFT Certified Partners had access to.

They ran articles, of course, but were there "advertisements?" These were publications writing about a major company's major new effort. There's no advertising today, either. What happens is (for example) Rust/Mozilla foundation's people set out to make every thread on every popular forum about Rust.

Any kind of press is an "advertisement".

That is why people that write about technology are called advocates.

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#115

Post by fastbmk » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

Go is a new Visual Basic. Probably good for business owners, because of the lowbrow nature of Go language, developers are easily interchangeable, like a commodity.

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#116

Post by kerkeslager » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #79

moocowtruck wrote: post #33

are basic languages good though? the amount of go concurrency bugs I've dealt with has been outstanding and quite brutal over the last few years; I feel like many times the same sort of c "i dont make mistakes" programmers are attracted to go and they also don't make mistakes there as well...

> the amount of go concurrency bugs I've dealt with has been outstanding and quite brutal over the last few years Concurrency is hard. Maybe something like Erlang does it better, but compared the concurrency options in most popular languages, and the bugs that go along with those options, I think I would far rather deal with them in Go. Perhaps the only reason you find concurrency issues in Go so frequently is becaus…

> Concurrency is hard. Maybe something like Erlang does it better, but compared the concurrency options in most popular languages, and the bugs that go along with those options, I think I would far rather deal with them in Go.

Concurrency isn't really that hard in Erlang, and Erlang isn't the only language that handles concurrency well. "Concurrency is hard" is usually paired with an implicit refusal to learn paradigms that make concurrency easier.

Why are we only comparing Go to popular languages? When I first came across Go, before it was a popular language, I immediately started criticizing it because of the weak type system and ineffective concurrency model: I wanted the attention being given to Go to be given to a better language. Now I'm seeing the same people saying, "Okay, but the type system and concurrency are better than other popular languages." At face value, it makes sense to compare a popular language to other popular languages, but that logic breaks down because the only reason Go is popular is that a lot of people made the bad decision of choosing it before it was popular.

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#117

Post by kerkeslager » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

privateSFacct wrote: post #8

arcticbull wrote: post #2

Step 1: be rob pike. Step 2: invent a pretty basic programming language using your old compiler from Plan 9 while at google. Step 3: be rob pike. ^_^

Avoid messy, gobbledygook, weak and no typed programming languages along with giant bloatware languages.

When Go fanboys say stuff like "avoid weak and no typed programming languages" in relation to Go, it just shows they don't know much about type systems.

"No typed programming languages" aren't a thing. Some type is inherent to any programming language that runs on a computer, because at some point you have to shove the data into a range of memory and it will either fit or it won't. Assembly has types. They are very weak types, but they are types.

On a continuum of weak vs. strong types, Go is very much a weakly-typed language. If you think it's strongly typed, it's probably because of two things: 1) you don't have any experience with a strongly typed language like Haskell or OCaml, and 2) you don't know the difference between strong/weak types and static/dynamic types. There's a widespread misconception among Go programmers that Go has a stronger type system than Python, which is pretty false: Go's type system is more static than Python's, but it's definitely weaker than Python's in a few ways. Go does have a stronger type system than C, but that's not saying much.

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#118

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #112

pjmlp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, The C/C++ Users Journal, DrDobbs, PC World, and Computer Shopper run articles on it. It was actually released in 2001. Unless you are speaking about the alphas that MSFT Certified Partners had access to.

They ran articles, of course, but were there "advertisements?" These were publications writing about a major company's major new effort. There's no advertising today, either. What happens is (for example) Rust/Mozilla foundation's people set out to make every thread on every popular forum about Rust.

It is my impression (from 18 years later!) that there was a difference. The articles about C#, back in the day, were kind of frustrating to a programmer (or at least to me). There were a lot of words, a lot of description, but not many details (as a programmer would recognize them). The articles were more written for managers than for programmers. That's marketing. (Or so it seems to me. It could be, however, that 18 years ago, I lacked the depth to see the details that were there.)

In contrast, Go's "marketing" is much more aimed at programmers. It's got programmer-level details. It's not trying to sell your manager on the language.

> What happens is (for example) Rust/Mozilla foundation's people set out to make every thread on every popular forum about Rust.

I completely disagree with this characterization.

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#119

Post by danmg » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #93

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see very little marketing for Go. Compare, for example, to C# when in came out, or Java when it did.

Did C# have actual "advertising" outside of msdn publications? It came out in 2000 and I don't recall seeing C# ads. (Print publications were out then.) I picked it up early on and still use it (and F#) today. I've written a lot of custom desktop applications in it.

I remember going to Barnes and Noble and buying a programming magazine because it came bundled with a beta version of the .NET framework circa 2001.

Re: Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]

#120

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

adamstac wrote: post #82

For those wanting to read a transcript... Transcripts are delayed a few days but there will be a transcript. We have a human on staff (Alex) to ensure every podcast we produce a highly readable transcript that can also be contributed to via Github.

Transcript is now up, at the linked article.