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Go is Google's language, not ours

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Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#251

Post by 0815test »

cryptos wrote: post #207
jonathanstrange wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not about learnability, compile times or anything like that - Go has a high-performance concurrent GC and Rust does not. There are whole domains, problems and the like that are basically unapproachable in Rust unless you're up for reimplementing half of a LISP system beforehand. (And people do - that's what the ECS pattern often boils down to!)

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#252

Post by cfcf14 »

new4thaccount wrote: post #238
cfcf14 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. When I first started writing Go (coming from Python/C#) I complained an awful lot about what felt like pointless hamstringing of functionality. Go is a simple language, and you don't get many toys. It also feels very verbose at times, and forces you to think a lot about doing things which seem automatic in other languages. However, as time went on, I noticed a few trends. Firstly, forcing me to th…

What type of numerical computing do you do? By that, I mean what is the problem domain?

Mostly machine learning for distributed sensor networks (ie: smart meters). Deal with lots of time-series data, state space modelling, some recurrent neural nets (etc). Our shop has a 'golang only' thing going, which means that I end up having to reimplement algorithms in go sometimes from scratch.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#253

Post by fnord77 »

danielmg wrote: post #177

For what it's worth I'm a semi-grey beard (20 years in) and I love golang. For me it was like going back to being 8 years old on my Commodore Plus/4 and really enjoying writing code again. It needs close parenting. Java has been ruined by the push to include everyone's pet feature.

semi-grey beard here, too. Disagree about Java - it is stagnating because it hasn't kept pace with language innovation.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#254

Post by jacques_chester »

ggm wrote: post #116
tamrix wrote: post #87

Golang solves a specific domain problem google has. They extended plan9s c compiler with some syntax Sugar for co routines and fixed some whacky c stuff then threw in some gc. There's new and innovated about golang. They just had to open source golang because they used the plan 9 c compiler which was open source.

A small group of programming language professionals with fifty+ years of shared experience developing compilers decided to keep on going with the language family they invented and extended.

I'd say they have fifty+ years of implementing the same language over and over. During the fifty+ years they studiously avoided learning what anyone else had been doing, and it shows.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#255

Post by brown9-2 »

divan wrote: post #151

It's a dangerous type of articles that deliberately turns community against Go team, based on misunderstanding or plain false accusations. Go team said many times that generics are technical issue, not a political one. (see [1] by rsc (Russ Cox from Go team)) There are also stories like experience report of Cloudflare outage due to the lack of monotonic clock support in Go that led to introducing one. [2] The way how…

In my opinion the monotonic clock example cuts against this argument - originally the core team was extremely dismissive of the idea, even though it had been shown to cause pain for a lot of people: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/12914#issuecomment-15075...

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#256

Post by roca »

adrianN wrote: post #9
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

To determine how open a language really is look at how many widely used implementations of the compiler there are for the language. If there is only a single implementation of the compiler/interpreter than it is not really open but controlled by that core compiler team.

Most languages I can think of have one very dominant implementation and maybe another one or two that few people use. Python, Ruby, Java, C#, Go, Rust, Haskell... C/C++ are the only exception since Clang became serious competition to GCC and Visual Studio. Even Javascript only really has Chrome and Firefox.

JS has Safari (JSC) as well.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#257

Post by brown9-2 »

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.

A useful mental exercise here: if the core team left Google, do you think they’d lose power?

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#258

Post by usrusr »

dullgiulio wrote: post #197
EtienneK wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Java has been ruined by the push to include everyone's pet feature." Care to expand on this? Java is very careful to release new features.

It's not about being careful (they are--but always with the baggage of backwards compatibility), it's about not having a soul. Java has made a U-turn in adding streams and related functional features on top of a language that used to be strongly for OOP (actually defining the meaning of OOP for a generation of developers.) These different paradigms together make for code that does not read the same no matter who writ…

> Java has made a U-turn in adding streams and related functional features on top of a language that used to be strongly for OOP (actually defining the meaning of OOP for a generation of developers.)

But isn't that just an inevitable outcome of aging? The only way to never age is dying young.

And practical use of Java had stopped being textbook OOP (which means using classes to model the world and putting your logic where the data is) long before the streams API etc came along. Actually the shift away from textbook OOP integration between logic and data already started when the beans pattern drowned us in getters and setters, which already happened when Java generics were still the Pizza language sitting as a draft on Odersky's desk. I even suspect that lack of generics was a confounding factor in that shift, because when you look at a pre-generics codebase (which I happened to do just yesterday) you will find that the brave men and women back then spent an enormous amount of boilerplate just for hiding untyped collections behind typed facades which is a form of using OOP features (meant for modeling the world) for program structure, which is basically what post-textbook-OOP Java is all about.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#259

Post by playing_colours »

cfcf14 wrote: post #214
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…

I completely agree. When I first started writing Go (coming from Python/C#) I complained an awful lot about what felt like pointless hamstringing of functionality. Go is a simple language, and you don't get many toys. It also feels very verbose at times, and forces you to think a lot about doing things which seem automatic in other languages. However, as time went on, I noticed a few trends. Firstly, forcing me to th…

Interesting, that I saw a similar pattern like "at first I complained, but as time went on I found some benefits" quite a lot.

It can be that your learn a language better, became more comfortable with the way it must be used: say, stopped writing code in Elixir the way your used to write in Python.

But the other thing is that it's in our human nature that we tend to look for something positive in bad situations we exposed to for a long.

Say like, PHP was a fractal of shit, but when you use it for a long you will notice that it will make you more aware of what functions to use and how not to fall into some undocumented craphole, be more responsible, and do not take it for granted that some function would work flawlessly. The obvious benefit from the shitty situation.

EDIT: Grammar

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#260

Post by dx034 »

jon-wood wrote: post #206
silvester23 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google the corporation is represented by upper management, the people by developers. The question is if upper management at Google takes any influence on the development process.
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