Uphill

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 26 May 2015 at 17:13:18 UTC, ketmar wrote:
> On Tue, 26 May 2015 10:07:08 +0000, Chris wrote:
>
>> With Go I have the sinking feeling that it won't be able to 
>> contend with
>> C++ - or D for that matter. It took off due to Google and a 
>> fool-proof,
>> easy-to-use infrastructure. But it is way too limited and 
>> limiting to be
>> useful for more sophisticated tasks. Go's core devs even say 
>> that they
>> wanted it to be an easy-to-use, middle-of-the-road language 
>> for those
>> who work in their code mines, focusing on a high output, and 
>> it doesn't
>> matter, if you have to write the same function or for-loop 
>> with slight
>> modifications over and over and over again.
>
> and it really doesn't matter... for Rob Pike. he also don't 
> like shared
> libraries and other bells and whistles. sometimes he is right, 
> but
> sometimes he is too radical.
>
> Go is a "java from google", aimed to raise a bunch of easily 
> replaceable
> programmers.

Exactly. As such it cannot be a serious contender as regards 
quality and versatility. There will be loads of Go code around, 
millions of for-loops on hundreds of thousands of servers, but I 
don't think it will go any further. Languages like D that are 
flexible and take useful concepts on board are much better suited 
for the programming challenges of the future (e.g. sophisticated 
high speed data processing algorithms).

The thing is that Java and Python (and soon Go?) hit a brick wall 
sooner or later. Huge efforts are made to improve speed, 
flexibility and whatnot (JIT, Cython etc). But the real problem 
lies in rigid and narrow minded design decisions taken more than 
a decade ago. This is why it's still back to C and C++ for 
serious stuff.[1]

[1] For more than a decade I've been hearing that with Java 
8.x/9.x/10.x this or that issue will be fixed, or that Python 
will soon have native performance. It never happens and it never 
will. It's time to move on. Take the D train. :-)

> so, like java, Go can't be complicated. both Gosling and
> Pike are highly talented people, and that talent helps them to 
> design
> dumb languages (which is not as easy as it seems ;-).