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

Post by kiallmacinnes » Mon, May 27, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #80

nickcw wrote: post #4

A very well written piece by Ian Lance Taylor. If you don't want to read it all, he summarizes it here: > In effect, then, the current state is what the blog post suggests at the very end: final decisions about the Go language are made by the core Go team, and the core Go team all work at Google, but there is no meaningful sense in which Google, apart from the core Go team, makes decisions about the language.

Actually, I think the other key argument is here: > I believe that every successful language must have a coherent vision that is shared by a relatively small group of people. He points out that there are over 100 committers, nearly half of which are non-Google; it's only the small group of people in charge of the language spec that are at Google. It may be true that Google the company don't drive Go the language. How…

Post by tptacek » Mon, May 27, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #201

tptacek wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by zemo » Mon, May 27, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #132

zemo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You probably don't. You can still use gopath and choose to use gopath for another project that doesn't.

Post by eikenberry » Mon, May 27, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

tomohawk wrote: post #149

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 are many of us in the Go community who like Go the way it is. The last thing we want is another Java ecosystem, which feels like something designed by archonaut committee more than anything coherent. Better to not have generics than to have generics that are bodged into the language like they were in Java.

Post by zemo » Mon, May 27, 2019, 6:35 PM UTC

c3534l wrote: post #58

Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had m…