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Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

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Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#191

Not saying anything about Go necessarily, but Google being behind a technology doesn’t exactly give me a warm and fuzzy that it will be “supported for years to come”.

What does it even mean for it to be "supported for years to come"? It's not a web service.

> What does it even mean for it to be "supported for years to come"? It's not a web service.

I'm pretty sure those writing and building software today would like it to build and run 6 months from now.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#192
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it even mean for it to be "supported for years to come"? It's not a web service.

Keep the language working on newer devices, update the compiler, expose new features of the hardware etc... Even if you don't mind if the language itself stops evolving you still need somebody to maintain it. I'm fine coding in C99 without the features of newer standards but if I can't find a C compiler that can efficiently target modern architectures I have a problem.

And volunteers can't do that for Go like they do for other languages why?

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#193
Honestly, I'm very confused by all this. Don't like it, fork it no? Isn't that the whole point of open source? Any project needs to have a certain set of people in charge of making actual decisions and working on those. You'll never have every single user be a part of that decision making. It wouldn't scale.

What language is not driven by a handful of decision maker? Even what could be argued to be committee driven languages, like say Java, are very much controlled by a handful of committee members.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#194

Why not petition Google to donate the Go project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, since many of the core technologies (including Kubernetes, Prometheus) that make up the cloud native space are written in Go?

And why exactly would they do this?

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. And this mailing list post exemplifies that even Googlers don't realize the soft power they have. How many of us get to be lunch or drinking buddies with Russ Cox or Rob Pike? Googlers have much easier access to both than the external community and those are really the only two that matter.

This situation feels similar to the need of politicians to divest any potential conflicts of interest. I would not accept “just trust me” as a response. As long as there’s a possible conflict of interest, there will be ethical concerns.

> This situation feels similar to the need of politicians to divest any potential conflicts of interest.

With the key difference being that you can use a different language and achieve the same results you want. You can't just pick a different government.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source code is of limited use if a company decides it is no longer interested and never allowed external developers into the processes that would have, over time, given them the necessary context to run with the project. At that point the only real hope the project has is that some nucleus of people quit the former sponsoring company to keep it going.

Almost every major significant OSS project has a corporate sponsor (usually in the form of paid employees doing the bulk of contributions). Don't see the problem with that. And it's usually problems people are solving are work that instigate most of these contributions, so it's a damn good thing Go has a company like Google to act as steward, regardless of all the useless FUD people like to pretend "may" happen becau…

> Almost every major significant OSS project has a corporate sponsor (usually in the form of paid employees doing the bulk of contributions). Don't see the problem with that.

Your arguments are deeply cargo cult-ish: they lack any rational train of thought and boil down to an empty belief on how a greater power will eventuall deliver good things to those who have faith in it.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#197
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter where the person worked? Python definitely was not Google’s or any other corp’s.

Of course it matters. That's the whole reason the Go Is Google's Language post exists. And the whole reason the response exists, and this very comment thread, too.

Absolutely not. It is one thing to create a language and maontain it and another to hire someone who created a language some years ago.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#198
Slightly unrelated, but has anyone heard of and used Fantom https://fantom.org/ before. If not, and you like Go, I recommend you check it out. It's a great language which I wish was a lot more popular. Similar to Go, it only has Generics for core data-structures. They have similar reasoning as well, that beyond those use cases, they're almost never practically needed for the amount of complexity they add to the compiler. It has first class Actor support for concurrency, as opposed to Go'suse of CSP. And its standard library is awesome. It's a very small community, but worth a look.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#199
post #178

There is a difference between open source and open governance. Go is open source but the governance is controlled by Google. For example, the committee that accepts proposals is all Google employees and a subset of the core team, if I read it right. From what I can tell, they definition of consensus is that of this group rather than the community at large. This has business decision implications. Those who have had i…

This reads like FUD. Go isn't to Google what Java is to Oracle.

Also, by that logic we shouldn't use Linux since a single man gets to pick what goes into the kernel. Same for most relevant tools which are mantained by a few individuals.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it even mean for it to be "supported for years to come"? It's not a web service.

> What does it even mean for it to be "supported for years to come"? It's not a web service. I'm pretty sure those writing and building software today would like it to build and run 6 months from now.

How exactly is it that you think a compiler works? When Google withdraws their support for the project, what do you think happens to your Go install? The Go Playground is a playground, not where you actually build and run Go code for real.
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