10 ms·

Poor Rob Pike. He always tries to make things simple, and over they time entropy always does its thing. You can hear his frustration in his cited comment.

by bla2 9y ago

pjmlp 9y ago
All languages that tried to fight complexity either grew up to adopt complexity and stay relevant, or faded away. Programming languages don't get complex just for fun, their designers are tackling actual relevant issues. Go community doesn't seem to have learned much from the past.
- Ericson2314 9y ago
  Go's community doesn't learn from the past, but good languages fight complexity even as they add expressive power. (They at least try to get the most expressive power per complexity cost.) Pragmas, incidentally, aren't really a source of bad complexity. Per the abstract definition of the language, they really indeed do have no effect at all and are just comments. Yay! Implementations have properties too—they aren't just rude practicalities. Compiler's, in particular, connect one language (the input) to another (the output). Programas mediate how those additional properties apply to the language at hand. It's an interesting mental challenge to formalize them in the absence of a compiler having an comcrete stable ABI. So in conclusion, go people once again don't understand good design. Pragmas are not an ugly wart, but actually a great example of layering—a rare example of an abstraction that doesn't leak!
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    In Perl and Javascript pragmas are language level and are used to help people avoid some mistakes at certain stages of software development. This is fine, no leaky abstractions. In Go they are lower level and therefore are side effects of leaky abstractions in compiler and language design. So they should be fixed, not kept or turned into pragmas in the spec. The choices I can think of: either make Go lower level itself or move low level stuff into another intermediate lower level language.
    - jerf 9y ago
      There's another choice, which is to keep doing things the way they are being done, simply not add another 20 pragmas, and get on with life because there isn't actually a problem here. None of the problems with pragmas I've seen in other languages are present in Go, since the pragmas are simple and mostly used only by the implementation and/or compiler itself, and there's no interactions, or massive code complexity from ifdefs, or string-concatenation-based macro disasters, or any of the other real problems caused by pragmas, with the possible faint exception of pragmas not being cleanly delineated from the comment syntax, which is still not causing any huge problems I can see, nor is that likely to change in the future. The problems that C has with pragmas, and that C++ imported from pragmas, can not be naively imputed to other languages without demonstrating there's actually a problem here. This wouldn't even make my top 10 issues with Go; I'm not sure it's even an issue at all.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      > In Perl [...] pragmas are language level No, actually. The syntax that people use to invoke the pragma ("use strict [arg]...") is not a pragma at the language level, it's just the syntax for importing symbols from modules. For example, use strict ('vars', 'refs'); expands to BEGIN { require 'strict'; strict->import('vars', 'refs'); } because that's how the "use" statement is defined. `BEGIN{...}` cause the statements in the block to be executed as soon as the BEGIN block has been fully parsed [1]. `require 'strict'` loads the module `strict.pm` from the library path (the source code is on CPAN at [2], if you're interested), then its `import()` method is called with two string arguments. The implementation of that method is: sub import { shift; $^H |= @_ ? &bits : all_bits | all_explicit_bits; } There's a lot of weird Perl syntax in there, but the gist is that it modifies the $^H variable. And THAT is the actual pragma which is defined by the language. [3] The module strict.pm is just a wrapper around $^H to make things a bit more user-friendly. I know that's sorta kinda off-topic, but since we're talking about language design, I figured I'd contribute this small anecdote that illustrates really well how the more recent parts of Perl are designed: a ton of metaprogramming on top of relatively small changes to the core language. If you want another example, have a look at how object-oriented programming was tacked on to Perl as a tiny afterthought, yet the way it interacts with all the other parts of the language makes hugely powerful OOP frameworks like Moose possible. (OTOH, that approach also makes the language pretty messy, but it always gets the job done for me, at many scales.) [1] Usually, execution only begins when the entire file has been parsed, but this code needs to run earlier because it changes the parser's behavior. [2] https://metacpan.org/source/SHAY/perl-5.26.1/lib/strict.pm https://metacpan.org/source/SHAY/perl-5.26.1/lib/strict.pm [3] Notably, $^H behaves differently from other variables: Every assignment to it is scoped only to the current block, whereas regular variables need to be shadowed explicitly. This is particularly useful to temporarily lift a strictness requirement for a single statement, similar to how `unsafe` is used in Rust: use strict; ... my $function_name = 'implementation_' . ($x + 2 * $y); $function_name(); //error: cannot call string value { no strict 'refs'; //"no" is like "use", but in reverse (calls the module's unimport() instead of import()) $function_name(); //works: calls the function with the name stored in the variable }
  - guntars 9y ago
    I wouldn't go as far to say that having undocumented magic comments doesn't add complexity. From a very surface level, sure, the parser is the same, but now every tool that works with the Go language needs to be aware of these. Linters, for example, need to not complain about the missing space in front of the comment, but only if the comment starts with "go:". Ultimately anything that changes how the program is executed is going to add complexity, so they might as well "make it official" and add a keyword for it.
- toprerules 9y ago
  This is true for languages that try to be all things to all people (a la Java). All languages are DSLs, and if you target just a few specific domains and beat back the masses who want the language to expand beyond its intended purpose, than simplicity remains possible.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    DSLs shouldn't be turing complete and turing complete languages shouldn't try to be DSLs. Ant was a DSL that managed to become turing complete and the results were pretty horrible.
    - nerdponx 9y ago
      Turing completeness is a symptom, not a cause. No one would argue that SQL is bad because some implementations are Turing-complete [0]. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/7580013 https://stackoverflow.com/a/7580013
      - crdoconnor 9y ago
        >No one would argue that SQL is bad because some implementations are Turing-complete They do actually. Though when people do say that it tends to be phrased "keeping business logic in stored procedures is a bad idea". People argue that all the damn time. Accidental turing completeness usually signals a design flaw somewhere (would you also consider it too controversial to argue that C++ templates mentioned in your link are nasty and people complain about them a lot?).
- PopsiclePete 9y ago
  >All languages that tried to fight complexity either grew up to adopt complexity and stay relevant, or faded away. And yet, to this day, C is just as, if not more popular, than C++. Why is that? I can do so much more in C++, but I, and my colleagues, pick plain-old C every time.
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    You're in the minority. For new projects, C is much less popular than C++.
    - marrs 9y ago
      It might not be that easy to tell. The C++ I write (for myself) is essentially plain C. No templates, dynamic dispatch, constructors, or exceptions. Most of the standard libs I use begin with the letter 'c'. It uses some C++ features, but it's philosophically much closer to C code.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        If it only compiles with a C++ compiler, it is C++, regardless of the amount of language features being used.
        marrs 9y ago
        That's fine, but I don't think that's what people mean when they say C++. I certainly wouldn't call myself a C++ coder and, if I applied for a C++ job, I'm pretty sure that, after I had explained that I don't do exceptions, virtuals, or the STL, I'd be politely shown the door.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Thanks Linux. C was already on the way out when Linus created Linux. Apple was migrating from Object Pascal to C++. IBM had CSet++ for OS/2. Borland, Microsoft, Zortech, Symatec were selling C++ frameworks. UNIX vendors were playing with Taligent and CORBA. BeOS and Symbian were developed in C++. Then came Linus, made Linux with GNU on top. GNU project for a long time always mentioned that the go to language for GNU projects should be C. All major C compilers are written in C++ nowadays, there is hardly any reason to stay with C outside UNIX world.
- Thaxll 9y ago
  > Programming languages don't get complex just for fun, their designers are tackling actual relevant issues. Have you ever used C++ templates? I mean every popular languages have issues related to design complexity.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    Some complexity is avoidable, other isn't. Besides C++ templates are a result of creating a conceptually simple, one size fits all solution for generics, metaprograming, library tuning, and some dozens of other problems that other languages have specialized tools to solve. Turns out that the complex set of features works better.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      Is it a complex set of features, or rather a set of focused tools?
      - marcosdumay 9y ago
        It is a large set of simple tools. It is conceptually complex because each tool is different and you must learn them all.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I did my first C++ steps with Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS. My first use of C++ templates was in Turbo C++ 3.5 for Windows 3.1.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dmitriid 9y ago
  Guy Steele, "Growing a Language", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > All languages that tried to fight complexity either grew up to adopt complexity and stay relevant, or faded away. > Programming languages don't get complex just for fun, their designers are tackling actual relevant issues. Yes and yes. > Go community doesn't seem to have learned much from the past. Well... if you start with something simple, and complexity comes, you can still try to keep it as simple as possible. But if you started with something that was already complex (but complex in ways that your theory said it needed to be, not in the ways that the real world said it needed to be), and you try to fix that, you wind up with something really complicated. Ditto if you start off with complexity to handle all the use cases of the past. Go started off simple, and is letting real-world use push them into becoming more complicated. That's a defensible approach, even today.
  - lurr 9y ago
    > That's a defensible approach, even today Not if you are dishonest about it. Not if you refuse to learn from the past couple decades.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      In what way is Go dishonest about it? In what way have they refused to learn from the past couple decades?
      - lurr 9y ago
        I think insisting that they need more use cases for generics is dishonest when you consider they used generics to implement library data types themselves. I don't mean they are outright lying, or are bad people or anything like that.
- Veedrac 9y ago
  I suspect the Go developers just have a very different idea of what the past is. Given the state of software engineering, I'm not quite as likely to put a positive spin on the things we've built since then.
- earenndil 9y ago
  Lisp?
warent 9y ago
His concern was directed at the magic comments though. I don't understand why they didn't just create new syntax for pragmas since they're already parsing something. e.g. #noescape # could be treated as syntactic sugar for //go: until v2 if they want
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Avshalom 9y ago
Yeah but Rob Pike's idea of simplicity is him personally not having to implement things. If every one else in the world has to implement the same thing a thousand times a day he still thinks his thing is simple.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  If every one else in the world has to implement the same thing a thousand times a day he still thinks his thing is simple. Smalltalk all over again!
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Actually even Smalltalk is more feature rich than Go.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      The community had a real "Not Invented Here" problem in our earlier years, which we never really overcame.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        I see, as I only used Smalltalk during university for project assignments (Digitalk Smalltalk/V), I never got to experience that.
- stouset 9y ago
  I wish I could upvote this comment a dozen times. Much of go’s “simplicity” is a Faustian bargain that comes at the cost of unnecessary complexity in each and every project that winds up being written with it.
  - tapirl 9y ago
    This is called trade-off. The reality world is never perfect.

Poor Rob Pike. He always tries to make things simple, and over they time entropy always does its thing. You can hear his frustration in his cited comment.

by bla2 9y ago

Poor Rob Pike. He always tries to make things simple, and over they time entropy always does its thing. You can hear his frustration in his cited comment.

pjmlp 9y ago

All languages that tried to fight complexity either grew up to adopt complexity and stay relevant, or faded away. Programming languages don't get complex just for fun, their designers are tackling actual relevant issues. Go community doesn't seem to have learned much from the past.

Ericson2314 9y ago
Go's community doesn't learn from the past, but good languages fight complexity even as they add expressive power. (They at least try to get the most expressive power per complexity cost.) Pragmas, incidentally, aren't really a source of bad complexity. Per the abstract definition of the language, they really indeed do have no effect at all and are just comments. Yay! Implementations have properties too—they aren't just rude practicalities. Compiler's, in particular, connect one language (the input) to another (the output). Programas mediate how those additional properties apply to the language at hand. It's an interesting mental challenge to formalize them in the absence of a compiler having an comcrete stable ABI. So in conclusion, go people once again don't understand good design. Pragmas are not an ugly wart, but actually a great example of layering—a rare example of an abstraction that doesn't leak!
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  In Perl and Javascript pragmas are language level and are used to help people avoid some mistakes at certain stages of software development. This is fine, no leaky abstractions. In Go they are lower level and therefore are side effects of leaky abstractions in compiler and language design. So they should be fixed, not kept or turned into pragmas in the spec. The choices I can think of: either make Go lower level itself or move low level stuff into another intermediate lower level language.
  - jerf 9y ago
    There's another choice, which is to keep doing things the way they are being done, simply not add another 20 pragmas, and get on with life because there isn't actually a problem here. None of the problems with pragmas I've seen in other languages are present in Go, since the pragmas are simple and mostly used only by the implementation and/or compiler itself, and there's no interactions, or massive code complexity from ifdefs, or string-concatenation-based macro disasters, or any of the other real problems caused by pragmas, with the possible faint exception of pragmas not being cleanly delineated from the comment syntax, which is still not causing any huge problems I can see, nor is that likely to change in the future. The problems that C has with pragmas, and that C++ imported from pragmas, can not be naively imputed to other languages without demonstrating there's actually a problem here. This wouldn't even make my top 10 issues with Go; I'm not sure it's even an issue at all.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > In Perl [...] pragmas are language level No, actually. The syntax that people use to invoke the pragma ("use strict [arg]...") is not a pragma at the language level, it's just the syntax for importing symbols from modules. For example, use strict ('vars', 'refs'); expands to BEGIN { require 'strict'; strict->import('vars', 'refs'); } because that's how the "use" statement is defined. `BEGIN{...}` cause the statements in the block to be executed as soon as the BEGIN block has been fully parsed [1]. `require 'strict'` loads the module `strict.pm` from the library path (the source code is on CPAN at [2], if you're interested), then its `import()` method is called with two string arguments. The implementation of that method is: sub import { shift; $^H |= @_ ? &bits : all_bits | all_explicit_bits; } There's a lot of weird Perl syntax in there, but the gist is that it modifies the $^H variable. And THAT is the actual pragma which is defined by the language. [3] The module strict.pm is just a wrapper around $^H to make things a bit more user-friendly. I know that's sorta kinda off-topic, but since we're talking about language design, I figured I'd contribute this small anecdote that illustrates really well how the more recent parts of Perl are designed: a ton of metaprogramming on top of relatively small changes to the core language. If you want another example, have a look at how object-oriented programming was tacked on to Perl as a tiny afterthought, yet the way it interacts with all the other parts of the language makes hugely powerful OOP frameworks like Moose possible. (OTOH, that approach also makes the language pretty messy, but it always gets the job done for me, at many scales.) [1] Usually, execution only begins when the entire file has been parsed, but this code needs to run earlier because it changes the parser's behavior. [2] https://metacpan.org/source/SHAY/perl-5.26.1/lib/strict.pm https://metacpan.org/source/SHAY/perl-5.26.1/lib/strict.pm [3] Notably, $^H behaves differently from other variables: Every assignment to it is scoped only to the current block, whereas regular variables need to be shadowed explicitly. This is particularly useful to temporarily lift a strictness requirement for a single statement, similar to how `unsafe` is used in Rust: use strict; ... my $function_name = 'implementation_' . ($x + 2 * $y); $function_name(); //error: cannot call string value { no strict 'refs'; //"no" is like "use", but in reverse (calls the module's unimport() instead of import()) $function_name(); //works: calls the function with the name stored in the variable }
- guntars 9y ago
  I wouldn't go as far to say that having undocumented magic comments doesn't add complexity. From a very surface level, sure, the parser is the same, but now every tool that works with the Go language needs to be aware of these. Linters, for example, need to not complain about the missing space in front of the comment, but only if the comment starts with "go:". Ultimately anything that changes how the program is executed is going to add complexity, so they might as well "make it official" and add a keyword for it.
toprerules 9y ago
This is true for languages that try to be all things to all people (a la Java). All languages are DSLs, and if you target just a few specific domains and beat back the masses who want the language to expand beyond its intended purpose, than simplicity remains possible.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  DSLs shouldn't be turing complete and turing complete languages shouldn't try to be DSLs. Ant was a DSL that managed to become turing complete and the results were pretty horrible.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    Turing completeness is a symptom, not a cause. No one would argue that SQL is bad because some implementations are Turing-complete [0]. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/7580013 https://stackoverflow.com/a/7580013
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      >No one would argue that SQL is bad because some implementations are Turing-complete They do actually. Though when people do say that it tends to be phrased "keeping business logic in stored procedures is a bad idea". People argue that all the damn time. Accidental turing completeness usually signals a design flaw somewhere (would you also consider it too controversial to argue that C++ templates mentioned in your link are nasty and people complain about them a lot?).
PopsiclePete 9y ago
>All languages that tried to fight complexity either grew up to adopt complexity and stay relevant, or faded away. And yet, to this day, C is just as, if not more popular, than C++. Why is that? I can do so much more in C++, but I, and my colleagues, pick plain-old C every time.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  You're in the minority. For new projects, C is much less popular than C++.
  - marrs 9y ago
    It might not be that easy to tell. The C++ I write (for myself) is essentially plain C. No templates, dynamic dispatch, constructors, or exceptions. Most of the standard libs I use begin with the letter 'c'. It uses some C++ features, but it's philosophically much closer to C code.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      If it only compiles with a C++ compiler, it is C++, regardless of the amount of language features being used.
      - marrs 9y ago
        That's fine, but I don't think that's what people mean when they say C++. I certainly wouldn't call myself a C++ coder and, if I applied for a C++ job, I'm pretty sure that, after I had explained that I don't do exceptions, virtuals, or the STL, I'd be politely shown the door.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Thanks Linux. C was already on the way out when Linus created Linux. Apple was migrating from Object Pascal to C++. IBM had CSet++ for OS/2. Borland, Microsoft, Zortech, Symatec were selling C++ frameworks. UNIX vendors were playing with Taligent and CORBA. BeOS and Symbian were developed in C++. Then came Linus, made Linux with GNU on top. GNU project for a long time always mentioned that the go to language for GNU projects should be C. All major C compilers are written in C++ nowadays, there is hardly any reason to stay with C outside UNIX world.
Thaxll 9y ago
> Programming languages don't get complex just for fun, their designers are tackling actual relevant issues. Have you ever used C++ templates? I mean every popular languages have issues related to design complexity.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  Some complexity is avoidable, other isn't. Besides C++ templates are a result of creating a conceptually simple, one size fits all solution for generics, metaprograming, library tuning, and some dozens of other problems that other languages have specialized tools to solve. Turns out that the complex set of features works better.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    Is it a complex set of features, or rather a set of focused tools?
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      It is a large set of simple tools. It is conceptually complex because each tool is different and you must learn them all.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I did my first C++ steps with Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS. My first use of C++ templates was in Turbo C++ 3.5 for Windows 3.1.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dmitriid 9y ago
Guy Steele, "Growing a Language", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> All languages that tried to fight complexity either grew up to adopt complexity and stay relevant, or faded away. > Programming languages don't get complex just for fun, their designers are tackling actual relevant issues. Yes and yes. > Go community doesn't seem to have learned much from the past. Well... if you start with something simple, and complexity comes, you can still try to keep it as simple as possible. But if you started with something that was already complex (but complex in ways that your theory said it needed to be, not in the ways that the real world said it needed to be), and you try to fix that, you wind up with something really complicated. Ditto if you start off with complexity to handle all the use cases of the past. Go started off simple, and is letting real-world use push them into becoming more complicated. That's a defensible approach, even today.
- lurr 9y ago
  > That's a defensible approach, even today Not if you are dishonest about it. Not if you refuse to learn from the past couple decades.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    In what way is Go dishonest about it? In what way have they refused to learn from the past couple decades?
    - lurr 9y ago
      I think insisting that they need more use cases for generics is dishonest when you consider they used generics to implement library data types themselves. I don't mean they are outright lying, or are bad people or anything like that.
Veedrac 9y ago
I suspect the Go developers just have a very different idea of what the past is. Given the state of software engineering, I'm not quite as likely to put a positive spin on the things we've built since then.
earenndil 9y ago
Lisp?

warent 9y ago

His concern was directed at the magic comments though. I don't understand why they didn't just create new syntax for pragmas since they're already parsing something. e.g. #noescape # could be treated as syntactic sugar for //go: until v2 if they want

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Avshalom 9y ago

Yeah but Rob Pike's idea of simplicity is him personally not having to implement things. If every one else in the world has to implement the same thing a thousand times a day he still thinks his thing is simple.

stcredzero 9y ago
If every one else in the world has to implement the same thing a thousand times a day he still thinks his thing is simple. Smalltalk all over again!
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Actually even Smalltalk is more feature rich than Go.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    The community had a real "Not Invented Here" problem in our earlier years, which we never really overcame.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I see, as I only used Smalltalk during university for project assignments (Digitalk Smalltalk/V), I never got to experience that.
stouset 9y ago
I wish I could upvote this comment a dozen times. Much of go’s “simplicity” is a Faustian bargain that comes at the cost of unnecessary complexity in each and every project that winds up being written with it.
- tapirl 9y ago
  This is called trade-off. The reality world is never perfect.