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Go is Google's language, not ours

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Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#151

Post by divan »

It's a dangerous type of articles that deliberately turns community against Go team, based on misunderstanding or plain false accusations.

Go team said many times that generics are technical issue, not a political one. (see [1] by rsc (Russ Cox from Go team))

There are also stories like experience report of Cloudflare outage due to the lack of monotonic clock support in Go that led to introducing one. [2]

The way how Go team handles potentially tectonic changes in language is also exemplary – very well communicated ideas, means to provide feedback, and clear explanation of how process works. [3]

Plus, many people in Go community do not want generics in Go (at least, in a way they're implemented in other languages). Their opinion also matters.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622417

[2] https://blog.golang.org/toward-go2

[3] https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#152

Post by steeve »

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…

This is a very bad reason to not learn a language imho...

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#153

Post by szuze »

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…

If you give Go to the community, the community will add exceptions... yuck.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#154

Post by divan »

silvester23 wrote: post #82
jmtulloss wrote: post #23

The article uses "Google" instead of individuals names to make the actions taken seem like sinister actions of a faceless corporation. My interpretation is that Google employs a tight-knit group of people that work on Go and collectively are the BDFLs of the language. This isn't that much different from most large OSS projects, although it does seem likely that this core team weights the opinions of those that they i…

The last two paragraphs of the article address exactly that issue - that it's hard to tell whether the direction of Go development is decided solely by the Go core team or by Google as a corporation.

Go team is actually incredibly open and approachable if you meet them at conferences. Google (as a company) has little influence on the language design design. Its needs has shaped design (obviously), but it's not like there are requirements outside of the Go team. Go is heavily used in Google, so it's a natural dogfooding process, but that's it.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#155

Post by pjmlp »

remus wrote: post #138
uranusjr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

Not really, that is the hand waving when the issue ever pops up.

Rob Pike already stated publicly that he is against the proposed idea for Go 2.0.

"Rob Pike - Go 2 Draft Specifications" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIvL2ONhFBI

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#156

Post by pjmlp »

fetbaffe wrote: post #100
rococode wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd use this as an argument that if PHP is the gold standard for a community-driven programming language, I'd rather every popular language be backed by a large corp haha. Actually, even ignoring PHP, I'm vaguely convinced it's generally better for a language to be backed by a company. I personally feel more secure knowing that there are people whose full-time job is to take care of the language, and I trust communit…

Visual Basic was basically(!) killed by Microsoft albeit large protest, so no, putting your trust in one company does not always work. PHP has been developed very well the past few years as community project, there is an open RFC process with a codified voting process in place. Sure there have been some drama within the community, but that has not affected either the language nor the implementation. What makes PHP a…

Visual Basic lives on as VB.NET and to this day VB 6 runtime keeps being updated to run on the latest versions of Windows.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#157

Post by pjmlp »

_ph_ wrote: post #90
crimsonalucard wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that is exactly the point - you would have added the best proposal available to the language vs. waiting till all issues are worked out with generics. Go 1.0 has been released 7 years ago, in that time a ton of happy Go users were able to use Go as it is. All the discussions on generics clearly show, that the Go team is interested adding them, but that all proposals so far had distinct shortcomings. Personally, I…

ML (1973) and CLU (1975) introduced generics to the world, followed by a myriad of approaches to implement them across multiple languages, so plenty of time.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#158

Post by Twisell »

pjmlp wrote: post #148
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.

Could you name some I’m pretty curious?

For my use case it’s a no brainer because only PostgreSQL have a decent GIS extension, last time I checked Oracle was lagging well behind.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#159

Post by nicklaf »

saagarjha wrote: post #150
nicklaf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assembler^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMachine code: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html https://research.swtch.com/mel

What's wrong with C/C++?

Real Programmers write in Fortran.

Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.

(It's a joke...)

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