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Go is Google's language, not ours

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Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#141

Post by remus »

weego wrote: post #133
cryptos wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> If it doesn't gain traction then the decisions made by Google are clearly considered the best approach

I don't think this is necessarily true. There are a lot of fuzzy factors that go in to making a language successful and it's tricky at best to get these right, even if openGo was a better language.

As a practical example, go effectively has one person who's full time job is keeping the testing infra happy. It'd take time and money to establish this in a go fork and going without it would make development of the fork much harder.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#142

Post by tannhaeuser »

adrianN wrote: post #9
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

To determine how open a language really is look at how many widely used implementations of the compiler there are for the language. If there is only a single implementation of the compiler/interpreter than it is not really open but controlled by that core compiler team.

Most languages I can think of have one very dominant implementation and maybe another one or two that few people use. Python, Ruby, Java, C#, Go, Rust, Haskell... C/C++ are the only exception since Clang became serious competition to GCC and Visual Studio. Even Javascript only really has Chrome and Firefox.

That's "consumerization of IT" for you. Millenials and younger are used to looking at pretty websites of "language ecosystems" and blogs about trivial programming problems to assess languages, rather than independence, maturity, and long-term viability as they used to before, and as demonstrated by having language specs and multiple interworking implementations, pluralism of APIs, etc.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#143

Post by User23 »

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 hurd about a thing called GNU...

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#144

Post by throwaway34241 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #52
theshrike79 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion the way they are handling adding Generics to Go is proof of this model working. They are actually trying to pick the implementation that solves real world issues, not just trying to tick [x] Generics in the Go spec sheet.

Parametric polymorphism is a real world issue. The fact that it wasn't checked off indicates to me that they are of the opinion that it's not as important. It's ok to have this opinion, I just disagree with it. I do agree that it's important to think it through, I do not agree that the language should be brought to 1.0 without it.

I'm not sure what GP meant by real world issues, but they do have some specific constraints that they want their implementation of generics to achieve, one of the core team members tried to nail down the details over a period of years but there were issues with the previous proposals before the latest one. So I don't think the issue is parametric polymorphism or not, it's more about things like keeping fast compile times, avoiding boxing value types, etc.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#145

Post by User23 »

calcifer wrote: post #63
ipsum2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what the distinction is between Rust (driven by Mozilla) and Go (driven by Google).

By my count, fewer than half of Rust's core team [1] are Mozilla employees, whereas the number is 100% for Go. Rust also has a very clear and open governance model [2], where the Go team is more closer to "we'll do what we want". [1] https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core [2] https://www.rust-lang.org/governance

Also Rust is observably a better Go than Go.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#146

Post by lucb1e »

C# unfortunately has the same issue, but the effect is much more visible. Few people (I'm sure you can find examples, but given how popular the language is on Windows, it's a tiny minority) use C# outside of Windows and it's a shame. There is no good open ecosystem so even as a former Windows dev I hardly use it anymore.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#147

Post by mcv »

Kovah wrote: post #34

I am about to learn a new programming language and I decided against Go just because of this fact. I do not trust Google and reading this article just makes clear how critical the state of the language is in terms of control by the community. Python looks most promising and I already worked with it, but I am not sure yet. Can anyone recommend a viable alternative for Go? Any web-focused language that is performant, m…

I'd say it depends on what you want to do with it. Go is, as far as I understand, mostly a systems programming language. A replacement for C, basically. That means it competes mostly with Rust I guess. (I'm not familiar with Go or Rust, though.)

Python is mostly an application programming language. It competes with Java, Ruby, C# and those kind of languages. Python also has tons of excellent libraries for a wide variety of specific domain areas, like Machine Learning (perhaps most famously at the moment), but also many others.

If you want specifically web-focused, Javascript or Typescript are the obvious places to go. Nothing is more web-focused than those two.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#148

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Because that are plenty of nice enterprise features that PostgreSQL still doesn't cover.

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