Go: A new system programing language

Bill Baxter wbaxter at gmail.com
Wed Nov 11 14:16:49 PST 2009


On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> But that's a good list.  In the video he makes it sound like generics
>>> will probably happen eventually, they're just not sure how best to do
>>> it yet.
>>
>> Just noticed, The Language FAQ[1] says the same thing about
>> exceptions.  They're interested, just not sure how to do it.
>>
>> [1] http://golang.org/doc/go_lang_faq.html#exceptions
>
> So they are roughly where D was eleven years ago.

Yeh.  :-)   But unlike D 11 years ago, they have 5 guys and a budget
to hire interns.  And the ability to hire more full-timers if it
catches on.

> One thing I dislike about Go is the incult attitude it fosters. Apparently
> its creators weren't aware about the existence of D, which is quite
> difficult in this day and age (D is the *second* result when searching for
> system programming language with Google after the obligatory Wikipedia
> entry, so it takes a lot of effort to dismiss it as not being "major" and
> essentially pretend it doesn't exist).

I think Walter even gave a talk at Google, once.  Didn't he?

> The authors failed to even exercise
> due diligence - there's a language called Go! that has even a book written
> about (the news is all over http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/).

Yeh, but you have to admit it *is* a good name for their language,
with Ogle for the debugger.  And "Go!" != "Go".  And it's hard to
trademark a common word.  And Google doesn't really believe in IP
anyway.  And they can probably buy the name from the guy if it comes
to that anyway.  So while I'm sure it sucks for the Go! guy, at least
he's getting some publicity for his language out of it now.

> Also, the language does not make use of many advances that PL technology has
> made in the recent years. These things combined are quite indicative of an
> attitude towards language design that I highly disapprove of.

I have to admit I was surprised that they don't have any kind of story
about compile-time code generation.  The website doesn't even mention
it anywhere as far as I can see.  They talk about generics in the FAQ
as if that's some kind of pinnacle of PL design rather than a
compromise settled on by languages that can't manage full compile-time
capabilities.

> Funny detail - one goal is to avoid "stuttering" (one of the first examples
> in the video). Yet "Hello, World" defines package main and function main in
> the main file, and imports fmt "fmt".

I think  import fmt "fmt"  is a renamed import.  So it could have been
just import "fmt" or  import foo "fmt".   And he mutters something
about the "package main" maybe going away.  But yeh, funny.

--bb



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