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> This is a classic example of worse-is-better. C won over Lisp, not because “worse is better”, but because the C's advantages over Lisp (performance on cheap

> This is a classic example of worse-is-better. C won over Lisp, not because “worse is better”, but because the C's advantages over Lisp (performance on cheap machines) were more pronounced than the other way around (“safety” achieved by means of lots of runtime checking - by no means was it possible to statically rule out errors). Lispers fancy their language of choice the pinnacle of computer science, but the falsity of this claim becomes evident under close scrutiny. > Go vs. Rust plays out quite similarly to what worse-is-better would predict. I see a brighter future for Rust in the long run, for the following reasons: First, Go doesn't do enough for the programmer: Haskell and Erlang are safer and easier to use, and have much better parallelism and concurrency stories. What kind of silly value proposition is “safer than C” or “less verbose than Java”? Rust offers something genuinely new: half-assed attempts at “better C++s” have existed for a while, but “safer C++s” haven't. Second, Rust plays much more nicely with other languages. Rust is no more difficult than C to call from, say, Python. On the other hand, Go seems to be more of an all-or-nothing proposition: “If you want to use Go libraries, use them from applications written in Go.”

agumonkey 11y ago
And this 'win' is ill defined. Both won on their market. C was great to do what it did, Lisp too. All the research and crazy idea spawned thanks to high level symbolic thinking is still bearing fruit today. It's not a win as in market domination but gene spreading and still being alive too.
Peaker 11y ago
I agree with everything you said :) I also think Lisp is not truly "better" in the sense "worse-is-better" is ascribing. But if we suspend disbelief - then the Go vs. Rust story matches the one described in "Worse is better". Perhaps Rust will win out in the end and "worse is better" won't prevail. Despite liking the idea of Rust very much, I don't think it will.
- kibwen 11y ago
  This worldview is overly simplistic. There is no indication that languages ever "win out in the end" and there is no reason to suspect that the industry is not large enough to support healthy ecosystems for both Go and Rust, who, again, are not competitors.
themartorana 11y ago
"...Go doesn't do enough for the programmer" Seems like a "boo Go" echo chamber in here, but as someone that moved their entire backend infrastructure to Go, the offering was so compelling it was worth going against common wisdom and actually rewriting huge pieces of infrastructure code. And I'm hardly alone - many huge companies felt the same value proposition and made the same decisions. Go isn't perfect for many things, but where it's placed itself - among often headless networking infrastructure projects and backends, it's exceedingly good at what it offers. Edit: had repeated myself.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  > as someone that moved their entire backend infrastructure to Go What did you move from?
  - themartorana 11y ago
    Mostly Python. It's a similar story to Dropbox, CloudFlare, etc.
- catnaroek 11y ago
  If Go works for you, all the more power to you. When I tried Go, things went like this: First, I deliberately wrote a program with a data race, which the data race detector didn't detect. Then, I honestly tried to write a race-free program, and again the data race detector didn't complain. A couple of hours later, I realized that the second program also contained a data race.

agumonkey 11y ago

And this 'win' is ill defined. Both won on their market. C was great to do what it did, Lisp too. All the research and crazy idea spawned thanks to high level symbolic thinking is still bearing fruit today. It's not a win as in market domination but gene spreading and still being alive too.

Peaker 11y ago

I agree with everything you said :) I also think Lisp is not truly "better" in the sense "worse-is-better" is ascribing. But if we suspend disbelief - then the Go vs. Rust story matches the one described in "Worse is better". Perhaps Rust will win out in the end and "worse is better" won't prevail. Despite liking the idea of Rust very much, I don't think it will.

kibwen 11y ago
This worldview is overly simplistic. There is no indication that languages ever "win out in the end" and there is no reason to suspect that the industry is not large enough to support healthy ecosystems for both Go and Rust, who, again, are not competitors.

themartorana 11y ago

"...Go doesn't do enough for the programmer" Seems like a "boo Go" echo chamber in here, but as someone that moved their entire backend infrastructure to Go, the offering was so compelling it was worth going against common wisdom and actually rewriting huge pieces of infrastructure code. And I'm hardly alone - many huge companies felt the same value proposition and made the same decisions. Go isn't perfect for many things, but where it's placed itself - among often headless networking infrastructure projects and backends, it's exceedingly good at what it offers. Edit: had repeated myself.

BurningFrog 11y ago
> as someone that moved their entire backend infrastructure to Go What did you move from?
- themartorana 11y ago
  Mostly Python. It's a similar story to Dropbox, CloudFlare, etc.
catnaroek 11y ago
If Go works for you, all the more power to you. When I tried Go, things went like this: First, I deliberately wrote a program with a data race, which the data race detector didn't detect. Then, I honestly tried to write a race-free program, and again the data race detector didn't complain. A couple of hours later, I realized that the second program also contained a data race.