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Go initially billed itself as a language for systems programming, but that claim was quickly retracted when it turned out that Go's creators had a different not

Go initially billed itself as a language for systems programming, but that claim was quickly retracted when it turned out that Go's creators had a different notion of systems programming than everyone else.

geodel 9y ago
Not everyone. Just self-proclaimed authority who decided systems means operating system or some embedded code. Lots of companies I worked have title Systems Engineer or departments Systems engineering which has nothing to do with Operating systems but just some internal applications.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  > Just self-proclaimed authority who decided systems means operating system or some embedded code Systems does mean that. There are 2 broad categories of software you can write. One is software that provides a service to the user directly. That is an application. The other kind is software that provides a service to applications. That's systems software. Do you think there's something wrong with this notion? It's pretty well accepted over the decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming
  - slrz 9y ago
    Sure, and Go's most prolific users are in infrastructure software for distributed systems. You seem to agree with the quoted statement.
  - geodel 9y ago
    Well by that definition Docker, Kubernetes, etcd and so on are systems software. But people here somehow explicitly make it to mean Computer Operating Systems.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    By this definition, Python and JavaScript are systems languages.
jrs95 9y ago
This was all over with way before the 1.0 release even happened. There's no point in arguing over something that was addressed several years ago before Go even reached stability. Plus, trying to say that Go was a "failure" because of this is absurd. It was an issue of terminology, not technology. Given Kubernetes, Docker, etc you would have to be totally delusional to claim that Go has been a failure.

geodel 9y ago

Not everyone. Just self-proclaimed authority who decided systems means operating system or some embedded code. Lots of companies I worked have title Systems Engineer or departments Systems engineering which has nothing to do with Operating systems but just some internal applications.

dingo_bat 9y ago
> Just self-proclaimed authority who decided systems means operating system or some embedded code Systems does mean that. There are 2 broad categories of software you can write. One is software that provides a service to the user directly. That is an application. The other kind is software that provides a service to applications. That's systems software. Do you think there's something wrong with this notion? It's pretty well accepted over the decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming
- slrz 9y ago
  Sure, and Go's most prolific users are in infrastructure software for distributed systems. You seem to agree with the quoted statement.
- geodel 9y ago
  Well by that definition Docker, Kubernetes, etcd and so on are systems software. But people here somehow explicitly make it to mean Computer Operating Systems.
- weberc2 9y ago
  By this definition, Python and JavaScript are systems languages.

jrs95 9y ago

This was all over with way before the 1.0 release even happened. There's no point in arguing over something that was addressed several years ago before Go even reached stability. Plus, trying to say that Go was a "failure" because of this is absurd. It was an issue of terminology, not technology. Given Kubernetes, Docker, etc you would have to be totally delusional to claim that Go has been a failure.