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Go is Google's language, not ours

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321–330 of 679 posts

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It needs close parenting. Java has been ruined by the push to include everyone's pet feature. Oracle is moving to a faster cycle of development. There are some of us who strongly feel that some of their decisions are based less on what's best for the language and more on catering to the popular-and-loud crowd. I'll never forgive the addition of `var` to the language.

>I'll never forgive the addition of `var` to the language. I'm inexperienced with Java and didn't know this existed until I saw your post. It seems like a nice shorthand to me. Can you explain why you don't like it?

Misconceptions mostly. Java developers are some of the most conservative developers around.

And there you have the answer to why Java hasn't evolved that much, or when it did, why it needed to care deeply about backwards compatibility at the source level. It's because Java developers want it that way.

The irony is that people are now abusing "aspects" and "dependency injection" via frameworks like Spring that bring everything but the kitchen sink, but then the language becomes effectively dynamic, as via those annotations all static type safety goes out the window.

Therefore I find it interesting when Java developers complain about Var, because the ecosystem has in my opinion bigger problems. Compared with annotations Var isn't a problem because Var is statically checked, so here we have a clear case of missing the forest from the trees.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#322
post #319
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which boils down to the same issue. Back home CS means Informatics Engineering, a degree certified by the Engineering Order to practice, with enough theory and practice spread across 3 - 5 years. Those that want CS theory without programing have a major in Mathematics with a minor degree in computing.

What country is this? It’s certainly not that way in the USA at most universities.

Portugal, and many European countries have similar offerings, at least the southern ones.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#323
Yeah, that’s the case with any coherently designed language or software package. I don’t really have a problem with it. Now that they’ve come up with a workable module system, the issues of it coming from Googleworld are minimal. I don’t personally care about generics, and I like the error system so I find Go to be a great language to work in.

But that’s all just my personal opinions. What I found interesting was the callout of OpenJDK as a community-run language, but is it? I feel like OpenJDK is the worst of both worlds. Too much corporate overhang, and all the worst aspects of design by committee. But YMMV.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#324
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Graal had been mature at the time, I expect Kubernetes would still be written in Java.

If you mean due to AOT compilation to native code, there have been plenty of options since around 2000, their only "crime" is being commercial.

I'm aware, but I don't think any OSS project would have ever used them. Hence my mentioning Graal by name.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#325
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Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are similar only on a superficial level, at their core they have not only vast differences in terms of how they work but they also have a different philosophy. It is not a matter of what you can do in terms of features, but also how you do it and how that affects the IDE, which is a core element of VB6 as opposed to VB.NET where you could be using whatever text editor or IDE you want (it isn't a coincidence that…

I used VB 3 - 5, later on did a couple of ports from VB 6 to VB.NET, and I am lost on what you actually mean.

Doesn't surprise me, you are not alone in this as others who have used classic VB do not really see the difference between classic VB and VB.NET and to some extent not even (most of) Microsoft seems to get what makes classic VB special :-P. However i'm not sure how i could describe it better than the last paragraph in my reply above as to me the difference between the two is day and night.

It is kinda similar to not understanding how something like a jury rigged Vim with a GDB, file list manager and ctags parser differs from a real IDE even after having used the latter. Usually i'd say "you need to experience the real thing" but if you do not get it after you do, then i'm at a loss of words.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#326

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.

Hey ! Plus/4 ! Finally someone who knows it too :) Since it was missing the C64 sprite abilities it made it even more interesting to code something cool on it. Though at least it could play some games like Ricky Rockman. :)

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#327
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…

Ironically the community designed language is so complicated that programs can only be mantained by small teams of original authors, while the tightly controlled language is consistent enough that large groups can collaborate on one program.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#328
post #261
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. It's like a feature democracy where each library gets a vote on which features it finds most useful. Those that then get deeply embedded are clearly those that are most useful. Those features that aren't particularly used don't really get anywhere.

I sort of agree with that, but features often have externalities. For example, let's say I choose to use lambda case because it makes some of my code a little bit more concise. From my narrow point of view, that seems like a win. But then it's one more piece of syntax that external tools have to deal with, one more barrier to anyone trying to develop an alternative to GHC, one little piece of additional complexity to…

Do you need an alternative to GHC?

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#329
Go is designed with Unix philosophy in mind by people who created C and then wrote Unix in it. So lucky us that they are the gatekeepers.

Having said that, Go's license allows everything and it would be interesting to see a fork and compare it with the mainstream a year from now.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#330
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…

Companies pay Oracle because 1) PostgreSQL doesn't take you to lunch and 2) Oracle "just works." I mean, we all know #2 is effectively a lie but having the option to go to Oracle directly for issues (even if the response is just "pay a contractor") immensely reduces risk for executive leaders.

You can hire a Postgresql contractor for admin, bugfixes and features, and you can pay Postgresql corporate for bugfixes and features
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