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From the preface: "achieving maximum effect with minimum means." Sort of the anti-Perl? I say this as someone who likes both Perl and Go. Go is very contrari
by Isamu 11y ago
From the preface: "achieving maximum effect with minimum means."
Sort of the anti-Perl? I say this as someone who likes both Perl and Go.
Go is very contrarian, and I applaud this.
- masklinn 11y ago> From the preface: "achieving maximum effect with minimum means." Wouldn't be out of place at a marketing agency, with about the same level of truth too. > Sort of the anti-Perl? In what sense? The one thing you can say about Perl is that it's a huge language, so the anti-perl would be a very small language. Go isn't a very small language (like Forth), it isn't even a small one (like Smalltalk or Self) it's about the same size/complexity as an early Java. Somewhat bigger in some ways (more magical builtins and constructs) somewhat smaller in others (simpler visibility rules, no synchronised methods/blocks), but in the best case it's a wash. > Go is very contrarian, and I applaud this. Perl is also very contrarian.
- rudolf0 11y agoI think it's fair to call Go an anti-Perl. Perl is very liberal. There's always more than one way to do things. Go is very conservative, in comparison. I'd agree that both are contrarian, but for very different reasons.
- masklinn 11y ago> I think it's fair to call Go an anti-Perl. Then again, pretty much anything can fairly be called an anti-Perl, possibly even Perl.
- seiji 11y agoGo is very contrarian, and I applaud this. It takes more than reversing the order of parameters and using known-braindead ideas like codified tabs-are-good syntax to make contrarian ideas valuable. Just because you change green lights to mean stop and red lights to mean continue doesn't make contrarian suddenly better than the way things were.
- rudolf0 11y agoWhile I think your comment is unconstructive, I do have to say that I don't quite understand why Go decided to force hard tabs. Even more confusingly to me, I really don't understand why they seem to standardize on tabs expanding to 8 spaces rather than 4. The 2 spaces (of soft or hard tabs) favored by some Ruby and CoffeeScript programmers is too little, but 8 spaces is way too much.
- trevorstrohman 11y agoA significant fraction of the Go core engineers use proportional fonts when programming. On their screens, hard tabs are the only tabs that work. Spaces on proportional fonts are too tiny to be useful for moving code around.
- seiji 11y agoWhat? Really? Who in the world would do that?
- trevorstrohman 11y agoUsers of Acme, written by Rob Pike. See screenshots on this page and note that the font used is not monospaced. http://acme.cat-v.org/ http://acme.cat-v.org/
- pconner 11y agoIs there a reason why Acme doesn't use a monospace font? I couldn't find any justification on that site.
- trevorstrohman 11y agoIn this message I'm trying to make the argument I think they would make (I personally use monospaced fonts). It's not that Acme can't use monospaced fonts, it's that Rob/Russ/others don't want to use them. Proportional fonts are better fonts, so why not use them instead? One possible reason is that existing code formatting conventions assume that text is lined up in columns, but we have a tab key that magically lines things up: it's the whole job of the tab key. So, why not forget about space-based alignment, use the tab key for the job it was built to do, and get the advantage of using pretty fonts?