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Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

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Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#181

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

KronisLV wrote: post #166
cookiengineer wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reluctancy to introduce new syntax too quickly (looking at you, TC39 and Babel) makes go an almost maintenance free language. If you learned idiomatic go, you can maintain and patch other libraries in the ecosystem very quickly. Unified codestyle, unified paradigms, unified toolchain. It's a language with harsh opinions on everything. If you manage to get over your own opinions, you'll realize that any opinion up…

With it being so consistent and predictable, I wonder why it hasn’t displaced .NET and Java in the enterprise for back end development. Maybe because a framework like ASP.NET or Spring that covers like 80+% of the enterprise needs hasn’t quite emerged? Or perhaps we just need to give it a decade or so. There are still very few Go jobs in my country, most are either .NET, Java or PHP.

Go is displacing .NET where I work for backend development. We still use .NET for Windows GUIs but any sort of server code is mostly Go going forward.

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#182

Post by zozbot234 »

jeffrallen wrote: post #151
hankman86 wrote: post #147

Does Google actually consider Go to be a success? I get the impression that it failed in what it set out to be: a successor to C/C++. Or put differently, Rust has eaten Go‘s lunch.

A goal of Go was to put working on complex distributed systems within the reach of the junior people Google had access to in the quantity they were hiring. To whit, the kind of people who would have been able to work on a big Python system with 3 months ramp up or on a big C++ system with a year of ramp up. It is pretty clear that with respect to that goal, Go is a success. It has attracted Python programmers who nee…

> Introducing a junior person to a large Rust system would still take a year, because it is so much more difficult than Go.

Do you really think large Golang codebases are so easy to survey? I could see the argument wrt. C++, but Rust actually has a great featureset for programming "in the large". Take a look at the k8s codebase for an example of a large project that's written in Golang - doesn't seem all that easy to get started with.

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#183

Post by nasretdinov »

trustno2 wrote: post #173
everybodyknows wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nomination for RSC's greatest technical contribution: module versioning. Absolutely fundamental to the language ecosystem. https://research.swtch.com/vgo-intro

The interesting thing is - this went pretty much against the community at the time. At the time, the community seemed to have settled on dep - a different, more npm-like way of locking dependencies. rsc said "nope this doesn't work" and made his own, better version. And there was some wailing and gnashing of teeth, but also a lot of rejoicing. That makes me a bit sad that rsc is leaving. On the other hand, I don't re…

Iterators definitely have one of the strangest syntaxes I've seen, but if you promise not to break the language you better not introduce new syntax without a Major reason (like generics, but even those actually introduced next to no new syntax, even re-using interfaces o_O).

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#184

Post by rob74 »

randomdata wrote: post #157
hankman86 wrote: post #147

Does Google actually consider Go to be a success? I get the impression that it failed in what it set out to be: a successor to C/C++. Or put differently, Rust has eaten Go‘s lunch.

Go was never intended to be a C/C++ successor, it was intended to solve a class of problems that Pike and gang experienced in the software they worked on. Which is to say network servers. What you are probably remembering is that they assumed from their unique Google lens that it was C++ developers who had those same problems and would see it as an alternative to C++ when faced with those problems, but it turned out…

If I remember the legend correctly, the idea for Go was initially conceived while waiting for a C++ program to compile. Not sure about any of the other stuff, but they definitely got the compile times right...

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#185

Post by rob74 »

rtpg wrote: post #123

gofmt probably has alone saved so much time across the world (and is upstream from every other language ecosystem basically saying "ok let's just autoformat"). I hate what autoformatters do to my code, but I love not having to talk about spacing anymore.

Interestingly enough, I hate autoformatters (and use spaces instead of tabs) in every other language, but in Go you just get used to the way gofmt formats your code from the beginning, and then start to appreciate that you don't spend as much time on it anymore, so it's not a problem (at least for most people).

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#186

Post by slekker »

rsc wrote: post #27
dondraper36 wrote: post #21

rsc, thank you very much for all the hard work on the language that brought me into software engineering. Despite playing around with several programming languages, Go still feels like home. The development experience is terrific and I really appreciate how unapologetically simple and responsible the language and its creators have been. Good luck and all the best in all your endeavours!

> rsc, thank you very much for all the hard work on the language that brought me into software engineering. You're quite welcome, and thank you for this comment. I never expected when we started that Go would have such a positive impact on people's lives, bringing new people into programming and software engineering. That's definitely the impact I'm most proud of.

Thank you very much rsc! Golang not only helps me feed my family but also I created many friendships from using it :)

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#187

Post by rob74 »

akira2501 wrote: post #139
zarzavat wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW this kind of thing is why I don’t use Go. Generics are a basic language feature for a statically typed language. Go needs a lot more features to be usable, like better error handling, but the ultra-conservative community that opposes any changes is a drag on the language and makes developing in it a miserable experience.

> needs a lot more features to be usable I guess what I'm caught up on is the idea of "usable" is entirely subjective. To my eyes and fingers, Go has been fine without generics, and since their addition I've only used them once to clean up an odd bit of code around instantiating "module" like initializers. > and makes developing in it a miserable experience. Subjective or not I find this a bit harsh. I spent years in…

Interesting that they write "I don't use Go" but are still convinced that "developing in it [is] a miserable experience". So, which one is it now? I think many people would be positively surprised if they tried Go approaching it with an open mind, but all the FUD spread on HN and similar forums prevents that...

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#188

Post by pansa2 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #161
pansa2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some languages do better than others at saying no, and those languages tend to be the ones that achieve widespread adoption. Unfortunately that’s not at all true - Go is a real outlier here. If it were true, we’d all be writing C instead of C++, Lua instead of Python and ES5 instead of TypeScript.

FWIW I switched from C++ to C about 7 years ago and never looked back (can't quite escape C++ completely though because some important libraries are still written in C++ unfortunately). I vastly prefer TS to JS, Python and Lua though.

> I switched from C++ to C about 7 years ago and never looked back

I'm definitely considering the same, and you're right - it's not C++ itself that appeals to me at all, it's the libraries. I'm not sure what C libraries I'd use for collections (instead of the STL and Abseil [0]), or in lieu of CLI11 [1] or Dear ImGui [2].

[0] https://abseil.io/about/design/swisstables

[1] https://github.com/CLIUtils/CLI11

[2] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#189

Post by weinzierl »

jeffrallen wrote: post #151
hankman86 wrote: post #147

Does Google actually consider Go to be a success? I get the impression that it failed in what it set out to be: a successor to C/C++. Or put differently, Rust has eaten Go‘s lunch.

A goal of Go was to put working on complex distributed systems within the reach of the junior people Google had access to in the quantity they were hiring. To whit, the kind of people who would have been able to work on a big Python system with 3 months ramp up or on a big C++ system with a year of ramp up. It is pretty clear that with respect to that goal, Go is a success. It has attracted Python programmers who nee…

> "Introducing a junior person to a large Rust system would still take a year, because it is so much more difficult than Go."

A recent study done at Google disagrees with this assessment.

""it takes about the same sized team about the same time to build it, so that's no loss of productivity",

said Google's Director of Engineering Lars Bergstrom about porting Go to Rust in the talk https://youtu.be/6mZRWFQRvmw?t=27012

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#190

Post by foldr »

nasretdinov wrote: post #183
trustno2 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing is - this went pretty much against the community at the time. At the time, the community seemed to have settled on dep - a different, more npm-like way of locking dependencies. rsc said "nope this doesn't work" and made his own, better version. And there was some wailing and gnashing of teeth, but also a lot of rejoicing. That makes me a bit sad that rsc is leaving. On the other hand, I don't re…

Iterators definitely have one of the strangest syntaxes I've seen, but if you promise not to break the language you better not introduce new syntax without a Major reason (like generics, but even those actually introduced next to no new syntax, even re-using interfaces o_O).

Iterators don’t really introduce any new syntax, strange or otherwise.
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