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Go is Google's language, not ours

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Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#171

Post by juststeve »

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

The governance stuff is interesting; are there any programming languages that are structured in between "community driven" and corporate oligarchy? ie. non-profit with dedicated Finance/HR teams?

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#172

Post by otikik »

The problem I have with the article is that, as an outsider, it reads like this is not about Google. It reads like this is about features that the author liked which were not merged.

In an alternative timeline where Go was not sponsored by Google, deciding what to merge into it and what to leave out would fall into some sort of "Core Team". In that timeline, if that Core Team decided to not include the features that the article author is describing, then we would have an article titled: "Go is The Core Team's language, not the community's".

I can only offer one answer. Maintaining an open source project is a lot of work. If you care enough about those changes, make a fork, include those changes, and maintain it yourself. If that's too much work, then you are stuck with what others able to dedicate the effort decide.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#173

Post by _ph_ »

pjmlp wrote: post #157
_ph_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one claimed, that languages with generics don't exist. But if you follow the discussion about generics in Go, Russ Cox did a thorough discussion of all the proposals on the table and why they would mean giving up some of the core traits of the Go language. As soon anyone suggests an implementation not colliding with the core Go goals, the Go team probably would pick it up quickly.

Or phrased it in another way: with all the years of experience on generics, they still got them wrong when implementing generics for Java, e.g. with the type erasure.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#174

Post by ptd »

otikik wrote: post #172

The problem I have with the article is that, as an outsider, it reads like this is not about Google. It reads like this is about features that the author liked which were not merged. In an alternative timeline where Go was not sponsored by Google, deciding what to merge into it and what to leave out would fall into some sort of "Core Team". In that timeline, if that Core Team decided to not include the features that…

Do managers of open source projects typically get paid? Seems like a lot of work for a volunteer...

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#175

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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?

What has happened in the past is that features developed in a fork make their way back to the mainline - iirc in the Java world this was a thing with the virtual machine, particularly garbage collection. If a hypothetical OpenGo can solve the generics problem in a satisfactory way then it could make its way back into Go. Well, licensing and such notwithstanding.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#176

Post by 72deluxe »

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…

Let's hope we get some form of generics because in my recent use of it, I can see the usefulness of type information for parameters and return types but not the complete inability to say that this function will return an array of a certain type; I can only say that it'll return an array (which might have anything and everything in it), which is useless.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#177

Post by danielmg »

For what it's worth I'm a semi-grey beard (20 years in) and I love golang. For me it was like going back to being 8 years old on my Commodore Plus/4 and really enjoying writing code again.

It needs close parenting. Java has been ruined by the push to include everyone's pet feature.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#178

Post by fetbaffe »

pjmlp wrote: post #156
fetbaffe wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VB is de facto dead, declared legacy in 2008 & latest major release was in 1998. VB.NET is a new incompatible language, everyone invested in VB needed to retrain skills & rewrite existing software.

It was a huge uproar in the community, but MS didn't care enough & this goes against TS idea that the community can stop a major company doing this sort of thing. It can happen & it will happen again.

However that does not mean that you shouldn't invest resources in a corporate language, it just a false argument to think it can't die.

Edit: changed disappear to die

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#179

Post by 72deluxe »

fileeditview wrote: post #58
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…

Absolutely agree.. look what happened to C++ over the last decade(s).

Not sure - I thought it got significantly better with C++11/14? Admittedly it also became rather more complicated, but the changes were generally for the best I thought?
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