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

Go is Google's language, not ours

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 679 posts

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#131

Post by tragic »

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…

There is a slight difference in that all those tools are the basis for their companies' commercial offerings. Google does not sell Go tools or consultancy hours etc. Its interest in Go is to have a programming language that's safe, fast, operationally undemanding and fits the mental model of a recent CS graduate (as per that notorious Rob Pike quote).

This at least makes it easy to work out if incentives are aligned. Do I want to program in such a language? Yes? Then Google is probably not going to completely screw it up, even when they make decisions I disagree with. Do I like to wax rhapsodic about parser combinators? Not ever going to be a good fit.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#133

Post by weego »

cryptos wrote: post #32
warent wrote: post #14

"... can't we have something like OpenGo ..." > " ... this won't happen ... " I'm confused as to what's stopping someone from forking it, calling it OpenGo, and building a community around that.

This could be done, of course. But how likely is such an approach to succeed? It would effectively create a new language and in turn to a new ecosystem. Why not just use a different language (Rust comes to mind) then?

Sure, but that's a different issue. If it doesn't gain traction then the decisions made by Google are clearly considered the best approach, at which point what relevance does the openess have?

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#134

Post by mcv »

Illniyar wrote: post #119
pm90 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they alienate the community, the community can fork it, right?

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#135

Post by fmajid »

I've only followed the modules controversy tangentially, but I did go to a presentation by Sam Boyer, where he started getting emotional and muttering about organizing some sort of resistance movement. Russ Cox made it a point for Go's regex library to have bounded worst-case performance at the cost of worse average time, and Go's fast compilation times are a source of pride for the core team. That they would frown on a dependency management system like dep that is based on a NP-complete algorithm doesn't seem to have struck Sam as a total deal-breaker. In this respect I am fully behind Cox. As the OP says, the Go team has taste, and I want them to keep the language simple, sane and manageable, not a monstrosity like C++, Java and now sadly Python as well.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#136

Post by sam_lowry_ »

rob74 wrote: post #110
pa7ch wrote: post #17

Many like Go because it is an opinionated language. I'm not sure that a 'community' run language will create something like that because there are too many opinions. Many claim to represent the community, but not the community that doesn't share their opinion. Without clear leaders I fear technical direction and taste will be about politics which seems more uncertain/risky. I like that there is a tight cohesive group…

My thoughts exactly! It's important to have a community and to work with it, but, especially for a programming language, there has to be a clear concept of which features should be implemented and which not - just accepting community contributions for the sake of making the community feel good would be the wrong way. Otherwise you end up with a feature monster like innumerable other programming languages, and that's…

Go is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between Lua (dictatorship) and C++ (endless politicking).

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#137

Post by O_H_E »

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…

Great non-language examples are Debian and KDE

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#138

Post by remus »

uranusjr wrote: post #108
ehsankia wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar question, but rather, what's the difference between Go with Google deciding what goes in, and Python (a year ago) where the BDFL and a couple core devs decide what go in? Sure you could argue that a company may have different incentives than a BDFL, but in this context, it's not clear that Go would've been more likely to accept the change you're proposing if they weren't being led by Google.

I guess the most important distinction is the “B” part (benevolent). Guido is called that because he is known (since before BDFL is a thing) to listen to other people, and adapt when they disagree strongly with his decisions. Google has never demonstrated the same attitude afaict, and in multiple occasions showed exactly the opposite. Edit: And to answer the question, no, there’s no philosophical differences. And the…

Given that the go core team has committed to adding generics I don't think it's fair to say they don't listen to critique from the community. Is there a more contentious issue in go?!

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#139

Post by INTPenis »

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…

>I wonder why so many companies are happily paying Oracle (and the likes) tons of money instead of sponsoring an open source project like PostgreSQL.

Well does PostgreSQL offer anything like Oracle's CDC?

Edit: Nevermind, I just read up on using a WAL replication slave with triggers.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#140

Post by cheerlessbog »

ncmncm wrote: post #99
PetitPrince wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>C# is barely used except to target Windos The Unity game engine use C# for scripting; I wouldn't call that "barely used".

Anything less than a billion lines counts as "barely used". Anything less than ten billion lines counts as "little used". How big is Unity?

Unity is behind "Pretty much half of all games " on all platforms [1] I suppose it's possible there have been 100K Unity games written if you include abandoned efforts, education etc. No idea of mean LOC but that multiplies out to a lot.

Also Xamarin which if I read this [2] correctly owns a third of the mobile app market. I don't know whether that's credible but apps are a huge market.

It is possibly that could get you the 10 bn. It is quite certain that there has been more than 10 bn lines written on.NET Framework, probably far more, as for 15+ years it has been the dominant language for corporate apps built on the Microsoft stack.

On top of that.NET Core is growing much faster over time,according to their blogs, and it's cross platform as you know.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/09/05/unity...

[2] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/madp/xamarin-market-sh...

Post reply on HN