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OK. I should have said, it's not inherently a criticism, it's just a fact. That others may choose to use it as a criticism--well, that's upto them. Personally

OK. I should have said, it's not inherently a criticism, it's just a fact. That others may choose to use it as a criticism--well, that's upto them. Personally I don't think there's such a thing as a 'mediocre' programmer, I think there are programmers who have studied and trained in concepts, techniques and idioms and those who haven't. It seems pretty clear from that quote that Google is hiring kids fresh out of college, and instead of training and educating them they're throwing them at an intentionally simplified language to get them to churn out code quickly. Also I find it hard to believe that type-safety guarantees don't lead to good software engineering in industry, when the biggest industrial users of Python, PHP, JavaScript and Clojure--the dynamic language titans of the tech industry--have all recently developed and popularised type systems for them. And in fact, I also don't see how you can derive a criticism of academia out of those quotes when they mention 'researchers' only in passing, as a point of comparison to talk about their coders' skill level. Too much mental gymnastics for me.

chimeracoder 10y ago
> I think there are programmers who have studied and trained in concepts, techniques and idioms and those who haven't Which is really just talking in circles, because as I've now said in three consecutive comments, I have quite extensive experience with functional programming, and so I'm rejecting the argument that Go is simply for people who don't have that experience. > And in fact, I also don't see how you can derive a criticism of academia out of those quotes when they mention 'researchers' only in passing, as a point of comparison to talk about their coders' skill level. It's probably because, in five years of writing the language, I've had the opportunity to hear Pike (and others) talk about the topic. So when I'm responding, I'm drawing on that body of knowledge to inform what I'm saying, rather than limiting myself to a single quotation cited on a blog post written by someone who (by his own admission) is very new to the language.
- yawaramin 10y ago
  > ... I'm rejecting the argument that Go is simply for people who don't have that experience. You may reject it, but the fact remains that that was explicitly one of their design goals when creating Go. > ... a single quotation cited on a blog post written by someone who (by his own admission) is very new to the language. A quotation is a quotation; either Rob Pike said those words or he didn't. Who cited the quotation doesn't make a difference.

chimeracoder 10y ago

> I think there are programmers who have studied and trained in concepts, techniques and idioms and those who haven't Which is really just talking in circles, because as I've now said in three consecutive comments, I have quite extensive experience with functional programming, and so I'm rejecting the argument that Go is simply for people who don't have that experience. > And in fact, I also don't see how you can derive a criticism of academia out of those quotes when they mention 'researchers' only in passing, as a point of comparison to talk about their coders' skill level. It's probably because, in five years of writing the language, I've had the opportunity to hear Pike (and others) talk about the topic. So when I'm responding, I'm drawing on that body of knowledge to inform what I'm saying, rather than limiting myself to a single quotation cited on a blog post written by someone who (by his own admission) is very new to the language.

yawaramin 10y ago
> ... I'm rejecting the argument that Go is simply for people who don't have that experience. You may reject it, but the fact remains that that was explicitly one of their design goals when creating Go. > ... a single quotation cited on a blog post written by someone who (by his own admission) is very new to the language. A quotation is a quotation; either Rob Pike said those words or he didn't. Who cited the quotation doesn't make a difference.