Go: A new system programing language

[Walter Bright]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Not sure what I think about that.  Can you even have a "systems"
> language that doesn't allow pointer manipulation?

If you cannot implement a GC in a language, then it ain't a systems 
language. I'm pretty sure that's a necessary criteria, less sure it is a 
sufficient one.


> 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.   Lack of operator overloading is annoying.  I guess that's
> not unexpected given that their mission was to write a good language
> for writing servers.  But if they don't do something about it (among
> other things) they'll miss out on the game and numerics audience.

I was talking to David Held (if you haven't met him yet, you should at 
the next NWCPP meeting!). He has a lot of corporate experience with 
Java. Something he said piqued my interest when we were talking about 
IDEs. He said that IDEs for Java were necessary, and one reason why was 
because with "one click" the IDE will automatically generate hundreds of 
lines of boilerplate.

It seems that the Java IDE is serving the need that other languages have 
macros, templates, metaprogramming and other generative programming 
features for. If D needed an IDE to generate such boilerplate, I'd 
consider D to have a severe lack of expressive power.

Go doesn't seem to have any generative abilities.