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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”

#201

Post by simias »

tptacek wrote: post #192
simias wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I never implied otherwise, I merely answered the parent's question. It's worth noting however that Go's maintenance burden is higher than many other languages which are often a layer atop existing infrastructure (Clojure with Java, Rust with LLVM for instance). AFAIK Go devs write maintain the entire toolchain, including a custom linker for instance.

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

#202

Post by phillipcarter »

arendtio wrote: post #127
et2o wrote: post #23

“It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It” —- Google employee’s defenses of Go Even if it is theoretically true that Go is open source, by employing the majority of the Core Go team, Google exercises extensive soft power over Go. All of the defenses of Go seem to gloss over this.

While in general, I agree with that quote, I don't think that we have a problem with the Go core team in that respect. I think they do understand the problem but don't really have a solution. I mean, the community has (so far) just a few cases were decisions of the core team were 'not so good'. Sometimes because we didn't like the process and sometimes because of the outcome. But I guess, in general, the majority of…

This is partly why, from the perspective of another person at a company working on a language used by people, it's important to:

1. Embed yourself in the community rather than shy away from it. It's impossible to escape the criticism of "acting on behalf of the company", but being a member of the community can certainly help perception problems

2. Act more slowly on accepting things so that as many voices as possible can have a say

3. Scope what you do to what you're capable of doing _well_

Even if a given feature for a given release isn't what the majority want, people will use it if it solves a problem and is designed and implemented thoroughly.

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

#203

Post by steveklabnik »

holografix wrote: post #133
holografix wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain what a CLA is? Assuming a legal term...?

Thanks all. So basically you can’t build a close source app with GO?

That has nothing to do with the ability to build a closed source application. You can absolutely build one in Go.

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

#204

Post by paublyrne »

verttii wrote: post #188
spamizbad wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that kind of what Elixir and Clojure did? Neither language is festooned with bells and whistles and both leveraged the Erlang VM and JVM respectively to assist in bootstrapping their ecosystems.

Actually, Elixir did add the bells and whistles to Erlang, sort of. That is pretty much the whole point of Elixir.

I assume OP meant that Elixir is a purposefully small language. It taps into a lot of functionality in Erlang without necessarily re-implementing it. There isn't even a wrapper around the Erlang :sleep function.

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

#205

Post by fastball »

Crinus wrote: post #44
fastball wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language is not the name. The name is protected.

That is splitting hairs, the name is part of the language - it is how you refer to it, you cannot remove it. If i name my implementation Glag it wont be Go, it will be Glag which just happens to be compatible with Go. Someone using my compiler wouldn't be using Go, they'd be using Glag. As such, since the Go name is "protected" then the language itself is "protected" even if the protections allow you to contribute yo…

> If i name my implementation Glag it wont be Go, it will be Glag which just happens to be compatible with Go. Someone using my compiler wouldn't be using Go, they'd be using Glag.

Exactly. You're making my point for me.

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

#206

Post by bradfitz »

nurettin wrote: post #72

Like it or not, Google is probably paying around a million $$ a year to keep senior full-time developers around that want to work on the language. That could be used as a benchmark to calculate how much of an investment is required to have a healthy development cycle. If a community-maintained fork is created, it would need time and monetary investment similar to what google is doing just to maintain and develop non-…

$10M per year would be closer, actually.

(Source: public git logs for all core Go repos in past year, look for google.com or golang.org emails, multiply by typical Google salaries, which you can find on various sites.)

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

#207

Post by ska »

KirinDave wrote: post #17

Googler here, but these are my own opinions formed from less than a year at the company. My observation of Google's culture is that it can be very difficult to see the ways in which they dominate projects they participate in because it's very difficult to keep perspective on how even small investments by Google tend to overwhelm the volume of other contributers project. Google has a lot of great, productive engineers…

There is a good point about fulltime, and nothing specific to either go or google.

Lots of opensource projects get by largely on the evenings-and-weekends contributions of a (often small) number of contributors. Sometimes managing to find resources for a full time person or two at the core.

There are a ton of great, productive engineers out there. Some of them contribute across a number of projects in their "spare" time. It's easy to understate the impact even a small, mostly full time (or at least solidly part-time) team can make on a project.

Any company willing to put it's money where its proverbial mouth is like this can easily start to significantly affect the direction of all but the largest OS projects. You don't have to be google sized, you just have to effectively vote with hours (e.g. $) spent. The governance model of the project may help or hinder this to some degree, but in the end results speak (or a fork is likely).

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

#208

Post by grapeli23 »

planetjones wrote: post #49

Google’s takeover of deja news and its formation into groups.google.com was always a mess, but it seems to have got even worse. Now it’s at the point I can’t access the article on iOS safari. First it forced me to log on. Ok I did that. After which the redirects lost the deep link, so I reached a generic landing page. I tried going back but there were more redirects which made that difficult. I finally came back to H…

You have a problem with the browser.

It should display correctly on the 10-year old webkit engine.

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/golang-nuts/6dKNSN...

This works fine without javascript.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/go...

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

#209

Post by keymone »

KirinDave wrote: post #183
keymone wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rich Hickey's conflict with the Clojure community over overly biasing Clojure towards Datomic's interest I’m not sure I would describe it that way. I don’t know of anything in Clojure language that is biased towards Datomic’s interest (or Cognitec’s). The conflict was about Rich not having enough time to consider/review/accept changes to the language core and declining to relax acceptance of such changes without hi…

Having been a part of that conversation and mad enough about it that I've effectively abandoned the use of Clojure: I am quite certain I'd describe it that way.

Then you should easily be able to answer a simple question: what in Clojure is biased towards Datomic?

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

#210

Post by solidsnack9000 »

zemo wrote: post #118
baby wrote: post #104

Security consultant here. The fact that Golang has no generic is a huge thing. I've read countless amount of code that abused generics (unfortunarely developers think they have to use generics all the time if they are available) and is probably completely insecure for the simple reason that very few people manage to audit/understand the code. If it generics could only be used when necessary, yes, but there are no tec…

> The GOPATH is also a huge win. You always know where everything is and it is really fast to figure out about dependencies or structure of the project. I ... have some bad news.

What's the bad news?
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