3 ms·

Internal languages? Why would Google make new languages when there are already many great ones already available? It sounds counterintuitive and inefficient.

• teaspoon 16y ago
  Most of the "great" languages were at one time internal to a company or research group.
• RyanMcGreal 16y ago
  http://golang.org/ http://golang.org/
  • _delirium 16y ago
    That one actually seems more supply-driven than demand-driven. Google hires huge piles of accomplished people, and the senior ones then continue to work on whatever it is that they do, because they're well-known and independent enough that it's hard to assign them to projects they don't want to work on. So they hire Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, and the result is a programming language inspired by C and Limbo, because that's what they do. =]
• michaelfairley 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawzall_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawzall_(programming_language)
• btilly 16y ago
  There are lots of good reasons to create specialized languages for hard problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language and http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html both address this. Google has lots of people who are capable of creating those languages, who faced hard problems to solve that hadn't been tackled on the same scale elsewhere. Sometimes they wrote languages, and some of those have been widely adopted internally. If the language is well-suited to the task, this is in fact an efficient approach.