Go is Google's language, not ours • Hacker News Board

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#391

Post by nailer » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

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…

> Being told to use this opinionated formatter was like removing a 40kg bag after a bush walk.

I think the gofmt approach is becoming an unofficial standard. In the JS world 'prettier' has taken off and I think most languages now have a community anointed formatter (and new languages are likely to have an official one).

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#392

Post by codethief » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

reilly3000 wrote: post #365

playing_colours wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

+1 for 'fractal of shit' - that is a keeper.

I read the "fractal" part as a hat tip to this rather famous article: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#393

Post by james-mcelwain » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

RHSeeger wrote: post #333

akerro wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generics were added so late because they had to figure out how to do it properly, correctly, on the first time.

And they failed. They did the best they could, but the fact that they were added onto the language later (plus the desire for backwards compatibility) means there are lots of gaps and warts in what they wound up implementing.

Erasure is important in allowing interop from other JVM languages. Reified generics would be nice from the perspective of just writing Java, but the interop story on the JVM is one of its best selling points.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#394

Post by maxiepoo » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #374

weavie wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haskell also has the motto "Avoid 'success at all costs'."[1] What that means is not that they want to fail at the things they set out to do, but that they want to ensure the language is never in a position where it's so important that certain behaviors or code be kept exactly the same because there's too much code that depends on it in the wild that they can't experiment with some new interesting feature in the next…

The "motto" (if it can be called that) is not "avoid success", it's "avoid 'success at all costs'" which makes the sentiment clearer: increasing adoption should never be a priority over principled design.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#395

Post by TomMarius » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:14 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #322

iends wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have Theoretical Informatics as a field of bachelor study in the Czech Republic, software engineering is called Applied Informatics

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#396

Post by bunderbunder » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

Raidion wrote: post #384

bunderbunder wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Java has only things that were proved to work in other languages. But they still somehow keep finding ways to make them not work so well when implemented in Java. C# may move faster, but its design team is also much more methodical about ensuring that new features have good ergonomics. In Java, I tend to feel surrounded by hacks that were hastily slapped on in an effort to keep up with C# and, increasingly, Kotlin.

Idk, have you seen the interfaces with default implementations in latest C#? Also duck typing? Both are mistakes IMO. First missteps I feel like I've seen C# make.

Fair point. I switched from C# to Java several years back, so I'm at least somewhat working from nostalgia for a certain point in time.

I look at the feature list in the latest iteration of the language, and my thought is, "Y'know, you really should stop when you're done."

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#397

Post by sebazzz » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

I'm not sure what this article is trying to say. Microsoft C# is a Microsoft project. Go is a Google project.

There is someone who need to govern the project. This is a company in these cases.

The only other option I see is some board like (in case of .NET) the .NET foundation to allow more control.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#398

Post by grantseltzer » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:21 PM UTC

No shit Google has the final say, they're the maintainers. They pay developers millions of dollars to make the final call on what's best for the language. Even if someone were to start a community fork there would still have to be a central board of governance.

Suggesting that we should split the community for a feature that you like in other languages is a dumb and lazy argument.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#399

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:21 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #236

foldr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go does not have generic arrays any more than C does. You cannot e.g. write a generic Go function to reverse an array. You seem to be conflating type-parameterized collections with generics. You can use generics to implement type-parameterized collections, but it doesn't really make sense to think of type-parameterized collections as a form of generics unless you can actually abstract over the type parameters (which…

> Go does not have generic arrays any more than C does. Go does have generic collections, and generic functions operating on these collections. > You cannot e.g. write a generic Go function to reverse an array. You can if you're part of the core team and implement them as builtins. Go doesn't have userland generics, because users of Go are peons who can't be trusted with sharp implements. > which you can't in Go Beca…

[deleted]

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#400

Post by blablabla123 » Wed, May 22, 2019, 2:22 PM UTC

MisterTea wrote: post #344

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…

> The last thing I personally want to see is Go being handed over to the community to be designed by committee. I'm thankful for exactly that. Go is developed by Bell Labs people, the same people who bought us C, Unix and Plan 9 (Ken, Pike, RSC, et al). They took the time to think through all their decisions, the impacts of said decisions, along with keeping things as simple as possible. Basically, doing things right…

> Go is developed by Bell Labs people, the same people who bought us C, Unix and Plan 9 (Ken, Pike, RSC, et al).

Exactly and it comes in line with other research languages, namely Newsqueak and Limbo, both relying on channels for concurrency. I hope their other work will also find their way into every day usage though.