Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead • Hacker News Board

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#81

Post by carapace » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 12:28 AM UTC

alphazard wrote: post #56

> I don’t believe that the “BDFL” (benevolent dictator for life) model is healthy for a person or a project It's interesting that the best projects have BDFLs, and that the best BDFLs are skeptical of their own power.

The whole idea is a joke, it's right there in the name. It was a recognition of the "facts on the ground" of GvR's role as the creator of Python, it was never seriously meant as a principle of project management. It's descriptive not prescriptive, eh? The idea got reified all out of hand.

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#82

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 12:33 AM UTC

hgyjnbdet wrote: post #43

Out of interest, why are people so confident in Google when it comes to Go, yet every other day there's articles about how Google can't be trusted in related to Dart/Flutter which are soon to be abandoned?

[deleted]

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#83

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 12:35 AM UTC

999900000999 wrote: post #80

Thank you. Golang is easily one of my favorite new languages. It's fast and clean without the difficulty of Rust. I was able to create a small mobile app with Chat GPT without any real experience in Golang. I would like better mobile and gaming frameworks though. Although I really like Flutter, I think Google missed a major opportunity to use Golang instead of Dart. What's next? Any good for native Chrome support?

[deleted]

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#84

Post by darby_nine » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 12:42 AM UTC

anamexis wrote: post #70

darby_nine wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is true. Python had a BDFL and it didn't seem to benefit much from it. I'm not sure what other projects this attitude draws from. Off-hand I'd guess it causes less drama but no appreciable increase of quality, just like other forms of bureaucracy. Meanwhile there's entire landfills of failed projects with single owners who couldn't bend enough. We just don't find this worth discussing. Of course th…

Linux/Linus Torvalds stands out as another notable BDFL.

I'm not intimate with Linux as a project, but this is an attractive argument for it. Unfortunately my main experiences with Torvalds are motivated by his chewing out people on mailing lists for something stupid they said rather than fending off varied interests, which makes him look far more petty than competent.

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#85

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 12:45 AM UTC

declan_roberts wrote: post #55

There are features of the Go toolchain that I consider to be a requirement in all future languages. For example, if a language doesn't come with a built-in formatter that's a huge red flag. Go broke the tyranny of style discussions. Easy static binaries is right up there for all new languages. Kudos to rsc and team for all the work that went into making a great language. Good luck on your next projects.

[deleted]

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#86

Post by 38 » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 12:49 AM UTC

999900000999 wrote: post #80

Thank you. Golang is easily one of my favorite new languages. It's fast and clean without the difficulty of Rust. I was able to create a small mobile app with Chat GPT without any real experience in Golang. I would like better mobile and gaming frameworks though. Although I really like Flutter, I think Google missed a major opportunity to use Golang instead of Dart. What's next? Any good for native Chrome support?

> I was able to create a small mobile app with Chat GPT without any real experience in Golang.

so you didn't really create it then did you? ChatGpt created it for you.

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#87

Post by LudwigNagasena » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 12:52 AM UTC

ainar-g wrote: post #2

Thank you, rsc, for all your work. Development in Go has become much more enjoyable in these 12 years: race detector, standardized error wrapping, modules, generics, toolchain updates, and so on. And while there are still things to be desired (sum types, better enum/range types, immutability, and non-nilness in my personal wishlist), Go is still the most enjoyable ecosystem I've ever developed in.

> non-nilness

Ah, I still remember this thread:

https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/rvGTZSFU8sY/m/R7El...

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#88

Post by gary_0 » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 12:58 AM UTC

dblohm7 wrote: post #28

purpleidea wrote: post #7

Huge news! I hope the new leadership remembers that keeping golang small and simple was its greatest strength. Adding generics was too much, and while I think there are some important small cases when it's valuable, in practice people are using it when they shouldn't. I'd also like to see less google control of the project. I'm certainly thankful for golang as it made my https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ project po…

> Adding generics was too much I strongly disagree. Sure, like anything in programming, generics can be misused. But even comments can be misused! OTOH I am able to build things in Go with generics that I would not be very happy building without them.

The thing people dislike, I think, is that actually implementing generics and handling all the syntactical and compilation edge cases is complicated and ugly.

But generics as a high-level concept are wonderfully simple and useful ("let me use different types with certain code constructs without having to manually duplicate them, and stop me from doing anything that doesn't make sense"). It would be a far easier call for languages to add them if they were just a bit of syntactic sugar instead of a whole new section in the manual. (I do think adding generics was a good call; practicality trumps a fussily clean design, in my book.)

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#89

Post by wejick » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 1:08 AM UTC

Thanks RSC, since the past 8 years I really enjoyed working with Go. It's my first experience following a programming language development, all the proposals, debates and how all of them were handled.

Re: Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

#90

Post by arp242 » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 1:12 AM UTC

darby_nine wrote: post #84

anamexis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux/Linus Torvalds stands out as another notable BDFL.

I'm not intimate with Linux as a project, but this is an attractive argument for it. Unfortunately my main experiences with Torvalds are motivated by his chewing out people on mailing lists for something stupid they said rather than fending off varied interests, which makes him look far more petty than competent.

Only those instances make the news. And then get repeated time and time again. It's a super-biased view not at all representative of his day-to-day behaviour.

Also I've never seen Torvalds "chewing out people on mailing lists for something stupid they said", it's always been someone breaking something or something along those lines. That is: doing stupid. And it's also experienced maintainers Torvalds feels should have know better.

You can like or dislike Torvalds' style, but this little student from Finland created the world's most successful open source project, so I think he's probably doing one or two things right.

He may not be perfect, but being hung up over a few incidents over a 30-year time period is perhaps not too brilliant, and insinuating incompetence over this is quite the take. Imagine every outburst you have is public and pointed to for years to come.