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Go is Google's language, not ours

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Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#201

Post by fnord123 »

ksec wrote: post #118
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…

If we look at the Top 10 programming languages, I think only Ruby is community driven that has very little cooperate backing. All the other languages are driven by one (Apple;Swift), or multiple, (Javascript, Java) cooperate sponsors. I think the balance is hard, you will need lots of resources from Documentation, VM expertise, Library, etc.

The top 10 according to Red Monk[1] are JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, C#, C++, CSS, Ruby, C, Objective-C, Swift, TypeScript, Scala, Shell, Go, R, PowerShell, Perl, Haskell, Kotlin.

Of these, Javascript (w3), Python (Python Foundation), CSS (w3), C++ (ISO), Ruby (community), C (ISO), Shell (Posix), R (community), Perl (community), and Haskell (community) are not bound to a single company.

[1] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/20/language-rankings-1-1...

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#202

Post by IRLIamOffline »

willtim wrote: post #75

Haskell is an excellent example of a community-driven language. It's more mature and advanced than most commercial offerings too, offering a superior type system, fast and efficient executables, lightweight fiber concurrency, software transactional memory, higher-kinded parametric polymorphism and many more features.

It's interesting that you bring this up, because I'd consider Go and Haskell as almost polar opposites. Go is a simple language which lacks expressibility but with strong opinions on almost everything from formatting to architecture, which leads to a streamlined (and refreshing) developer experience.

Haskell is a complex language, with an expressive type system giving you more tools and guarantees but I would call the learning / dev experience everything but streamlined.

I wonder whether the difference in the organisational structure (single entity vs community) manifests in the characteristics of these languages.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#203

Post by jon-wood »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #170
kkarakk wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can see it already on github - survival of the fittest fork

In theory yes, in practice though, there's a lot of projects where the lead maintainer has vanished or doesn't spend a lot of time on it anymore making the future of the whole project and its forks debatable. Most forks aren't interested in taking the lead. The only exception I can think of was the nodejs fork, IO.js, which ended up being more of a political move and a kick up the arse for the Node team. A similar ki…

The Rails/Murb drama a few years ago is another good example I think. A bunch of people decided they didn’t like the directions Rails was going in, created a competing framework, and after proving the concept was sound ended up introducing a lot of the unique features back into what became Rails 3.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#206

Post by jon-wood »

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.

I don’t really get this distinction. “Google as a corporation” isn’t a thing, it’s a collection of people, some of whom happen to be the Go core team. It’s likely that due to being close to Go developers at Google there’s a bias towards implementing features that would help those people, but I very much doubt the subject of genetics in Go comes up at board meetings.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#207

Post by cryptos »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #164
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?

Rust is not a suitable replacement for Go.

Why not? I consider Rust to be superior in almost all respects apart from learnability and compile times. So if these two downsides are not more relevant than the downsides of Go (in a certain context), I don't see any reason why Go could not be replaced by Rust.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#208

Post by weavie »

IRLIamOffline wrote: post #202
willtim wrote: post #75

Haskell is an excellent example of a community-driven language. It's more mature and advanced than most commercial offerings too, offering a superior type system, fast and efficient executables, lightweight fiber concurrency, software transactional memory, higher-kinded parametric polymorphism and many more features.

It's interesting that you bring this up, because I'd consider Go and Haskell as almost polar opposites. Go is a simple language which lacks expressibility but with strong opinions on almost everything from formatting to architecture, which leads to a streamlined (and refreshing) developer experience. Haskell is a complex language, with an expressive type system giving you more tools and guarantees but I would call th…

I think a big part of the success of Haskell is down to its language extensions. New features are introduced as off by default and can be opted into. This allows all kinds of crazy features to be introduced without really impacting users if they don't want to. It does allow the community to be quite experimental without fear of destroying things.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#209

Post by reflexer »

doesnt_know wrote: post #162

I'm going to risk being labeled an ~incompetent dev~ or whatever but learning golang was seriously a breath of fresh air compared to literally any language I have ever tried to grok before. Everything felt like it was there on purpose. It always seemed like there was a "proper" way to achieve something. Being told to use this opinionated formatter was like removing a 40kg bag after a bush walk. You never have to worr…

wrt a "proper" way: adding item to a slice, uhmm?

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#210

Post by cryptos »

fnord123 wrote: post #201
ksec wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we look at the Top 10 programming languages, I think only Ruby is community driven that has very little cooperate backing. All the other languages are driven by one (Apple;Swift), or multiple, (Javascript, Java) cooperate sponsors. I think the balance is hard, you will need lots of resources from Documentation, VM expertise, Library, etc.

The top 10 according to Red Monk[1] are JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, C#, C++, CSS, Ruby, C, Objective-C, Swift, TypeScript, Scala, Shell, Go, R, PowerShell, Perl, Haskell, Kotlin. Of these, Javascript (w3), Python (Python Foundation), CSS (w3), C++ (ISO), Ruby (community), C (ISO), Shell (Posix), R (community), Perl (community), and Haskell (community) are not bound to a single company. [1] https://redmonk.com/sogr…

Kotlin is also no longer in the hands of a single company. https://kotlinfoundation.org/
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