Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

influxdb.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#21

Post by kyrra »

wyager wrote: post #13

Jesus, I hope not. Go now is like Java in 1997. A mediocre language with lots of corporate support and a big standard library. It's popular in the developer crowd right now because it's A)simple B)has a good standard library and C)getting support (in the forms of tools, tutorials, etc.) is easy. We shouldn't let those things be the deciding factors in choosing what language to stick with over the next ten or twenty y…

I'm waiting for the talks from Gophercon to appear online, but one of them[0] talks about using Go interfaces to handle most generic type problems. Another interesting read is Rob Pike's argument about "less is more"[1]. The HN discussion on less-is-more from 2 years ago brought about some interesting discussion as well[2].

[0] http://talks.golang.org/2014/go4gophers.slide

[1] http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentia...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158865

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#23

Post by noelwelsh »

Sigh. We're still banging rocks together and amazed when occasionally there is a spark?

Look, Ruby and Python -- their implementations just plain suck. There, I said it. MRI and CPython are just a pile of crap. We've known since 1991-ish (see Self) how to make performant runtimes for dynamic languages and 23 years later Ruby and Python still have crappy slow interpreters with no useful concurrency support. Note that Ruby and Python were both started around about that time and are in fact older than Java. Sure the JVM team has a lot of resources, but other language implementations, such as Racket, don't and they manage to solve these performance issues.

So let's not get excited when a language implementation actually achieves a decent baseline of performance. Let's expect that and move on.

Then there is Go's woeful head-in-the-sand type system and its dumb approach to error handling. Errors values are logical ORs -- you can return a useful value OR an error. In Go they are ANDs -- you return a value (which may not be useful) AND an error. Just dumb. We've know how to do error handling without exceptions and without boiler plate since about 1991 (Wadler; monads). Generics since about 1985 (ML). Can we move on yet? Is a quarter-century long enough?

Oh, and channels? That's Occam (1980s), if not earlier.

So what's Go? A language with an implementation that's not complete crap, and an inability to absorb ideas known for 25 or more years. I'm supposed to be excited that this will move our field forward? No thanks.

(This was a fun rant to write.)

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#25

Post by masklinn »

chimeracoder wrote: post #20
wyager wrote: post #13

Jesus, I hope not. Go now is like Java in 1997. A mediocre language with lots of corporate support and a big standard library. It's popular in the developer crowd right now because it's A)simple B)has a good standard library and C)getting support (in the forms of tools, tutorials, etc.) is easy. We shouldn't let those things be the deciding factors in choosing what language to stick with over the next ten or twenty y…

> A mediocre language with lots of corporate support It's very disingenuous to compare the level of corporate support that Sun provided Java and the level of corporate "support" (involvement) that Google provides Go. The Go project began at Google to solve the sorts of challenges that Google was having (architecting and managing large servers), and several of the original members of the Go team work at Google, but th…

So... a mediocre language with (very relatively) little corporate support but lots of corporate name recognition?

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#26

Post by manishsharan »

Does the OP even know what made COBOL successful and useful ? Or for that matter , does the OP even know a Cobol programmer ? I suspect the answer is no and yet his blog is being discussed on HN front page. Cobol predates the RDBMS and made a lot of sense when writing structured data to flat file systems. Cobol language and cobol programmers never aspired to do a general purpose computing. Back in those days, the scientists wrote their programs in fortran and businesses wrote their code in cobol and most computing was done on IBM systems. Then came minicomputers with DBASE. And so on. If you are a canadian, I can guarantee you that most of your RRSP backend data processing is still being done on Cobol ; I had a bruising experience when a newly minted CIO decided to do away with all cobol and replace it with modern langauges ( c# etc.) Long story short, the CIO moved on to another unfortunate company , millions of dollars wasted and the cobol code is still working.

And now, get off my lawn !

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#27

Post by pauldix »

noelwelsh wrote: post #23

Sigh. We're still banging rocks together and amazed when occasionally there is a spark? Look, Ruby and Python -- their implementations just plain suck. There, I said it. MRI and CPython are just a pile of crap. We've known since 1991-ish (see Self) how to make performant runtimes for dynamic languages and 23 years later Ruby and Python still have crappy slow interpreters with no useful concurrency support. Note that…

I think you're missing the point of the basic type system: simplicity. It's a bigger win than you think when it comes to attracting new developers and making code easier to read. Sure, there are languages that let you write more succinct code and support all sorts of crazy typing, but one of the things good code requires is readability.

Your code my be terse and elegant, but if other people can't understand it, it won't matter. Code is as much communication to other developers as it is to the computer it runs on. That's why I credit simplicity as Go's greatest strength.

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#28

Post by penguindev »

wyager wrote: post #13

Jesus, I hope not. Go now is like Java in 1997. A mediocre language with lots of corporate support and a big standard library. It's popular in the developer crowd right now because it's A)simple B)has a good standard library and C)getting support (in the forms of tools, tutorials, etc.) is easy. We shouldn't let those things be the deciding factors in choosing what language to stick with over the next ten or twenty y…

In addition, GO failed to advance the art of error handling in any way, in fact I'd call it a step back. I can already do multiple return values in python, or I can choose to use exceptions rarely or frequently depending on the problem and have easy syntax like 'with' for critical cleanup. Any language that demands 100% programmer reliability to trap errors is not useful for most projects that don't have google-level code review and rapidly changing project specs.

I've done the C way of checking every function for errors. It's painful, and should be done only when the problem domain demands it, which is a small subset of problems. Googlers are living in their own universe.

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#29

Post by pessimizer »

pauldix wrote: post #27
noelwelsh wrote: post #23

Sigh. We're still banging rocks together and amazed when occasionally there is a spark? Look, Ruby and Python -- their implementations just plain suck. There, I said it. MRI and CPython are just a pile of crap. We've known since 1991-ish (see Self) how to make performant runtimes for dynamic languages and 23 years later Ruby and Python still have crappy slow interpreters with no useful concurrency support. Note that…

I think you're missing the point of the basic type system: simplicity. It's a bigger win than you think when it comes to attracting new developers and making code easier to read. Sure, there are languages that let you write more succinct code and support all sorts of crazy typing, but one of the things good code requires is readability. Your code my be terse and elegant, but if other people can't understand it, it wo…

Readability is in the eye of the reader.

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#30

Post by pohl »

pauldix wrote: post #27
noelwelsh wrote: post #23

Sigh. We're still banging rocks together and amazed when occasionally there is a spark? Look, Ruby and Python -- their implementations just plain suck. There, I said it. MRI and CPython are just a pile of crap. We've known since 1991-ish (see Self) how to make performant runtimes for dynamic languages and 23 years later Ruby and Python still have crappy slow interpreters with no useful concurrency support. Note that…

I think you're missing the point of the basic type system: simplicity. It's a bigger win than you think when it comes to attracting new developers and making code easier to read. Sure, there are languages that let you write more succinct code and support all sorts of crazy typing, but one of the things good code requires is readability. Your code my be terse and elegant, but if other people can't understand it, it wo…

I think you're missing the point of the basic type system: simplicity. It's a bigger win than you think when it comes to attracting new developers

...and that brings us full-circle to the blog post: rounding the corners so that the developers don't cut themselves and avoiding ideas that require developers to get out of their comfort-zones is exactly what made Java so successful. It put OO within the reach of mortals who were unwilling or unable to absorb C++. Go, being simple and unadventurous could very well skyrocket into the Java/COBOL stratosphere.

Post reply on HN