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I know Pike _said_ that, but I think the differing level of success of the language in these different niches speaks louder. In particular, I think the idea th

by emtel 9y ago

I know Pike _said_ that, but I think the differing level of success of the language in these different niches speaks louder. In particular, I think the idea that anyone serious is going to build a large desktop application like a web browser in a language that doesn't expose OS-level threads to the programmer is pretty laughable. Similarly for the idea of building an OS (or at least an OS kernel) in a garbage collected language. edit: I realize I didn't really respond to your point. My point is that regardless of what Pike said, request processing permeated the atmosphere at Google, and deeply influenced the design of Go, whether Pike realized it or not at the time.

millstone 9y ago
That's really interesting! Go gravitated towards request-processing services in part because that was the largest audience in the immediate environment, which in turn gelled Go's future. We can imagine Go with the same engineers but at Microsoft or Apple or Mozilla, and its evolution would have been different because its first clients would have been different. The times make the man, and the language!
- danaliv 9y ago
  And because that's just about the only thing it's good for. Go has all the capabilities of Pascal circa 1990. No one in their right mind is going to use it to write a modern web browser.
  - geodel 9y ago
    No one in right mind should have written high perf backend servers in Javascript, desktop apps in electron or databases in Java but here we are.
eadmund 9y ago
> In particular, I think the idea that anyone serious is going to build a large desktop application like a web browser in a language that doesn't expose OS-level threads to the programmer is pretty laughable. Why? It doesn't seem inherently laughable to me, at least. Why couldn't someone write a browser in Go? I anticipate that it'd be easier to understand & easier to extend than one written in C++ or C.

by emtel 9y ago

millstone 9y ago

That's really interesting! Go gravitated towards request-processing services in part because that was the largest audience in the immediate environment, which in turn gelled Go's future. We can imagine Go with the same engineers but at Microsoft or Apple or Mozilla, and its evolution would have been different because its first clients would have been different. The times make the man, and the language!

danaliv 9y ago
And because that's just about the only thing it's good for. Go has all the capabilities of Pascal circa 1990. No one in their right mind is going to use it to write a modern web browser.
- geodel 9y ago
  No one in right mind should have written high perf backend servers in Javascript, desktop apps in electron or databases in Java but here we are.

eadmund 9y ago

> In particular, I think the idea that anyone serious is going to build a large desktop application like a web browser in a language that doesn't expose OS-level threads to the programmer is pretty laughable. Why? It doesn't seem inherently laughable to me, at least. Why couldn't someone write a browser in Go? I anticipate that it'd be easier to understand & easier to extend than one written in C++ or C.