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"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." – Rob Pike

wbl 7y ago
For a company with supposedly high hiring standards. Granted domain knowledge also matters but that isn't what the people described have. So what does Google teach them?
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  Everyone I met there had my respect. I find "not capable of understanding a brilliant language" to be baseless contempt and I'm surprised he didn't get more heat over it. I wouldn't work with him, nor whatever people he's trying in vain to accommodate.
  - tensor 7y ago
    That's really quite ironic given: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19825787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19825787
    - erik_seaberg 7y ago
      I should have worded that more gently. The greatest programmers in the world have demonstrated that even they can't use C reliably.
  - IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
    Yikes I think he is arguing against overwhelming programmers with complexity and the ability to hammer themselves with pointers, leaks and other banes of existence for average C programmers.
shereadsthenews 7y ago
That is taken out of context. Practically all Google server code is written in C++ or, at a much smaller scale, Java. Go is used for logs analysis, internal services, monitoring and automation, etc. Nobody at Google reaches for Go when they are thinking of high performance nor would anyone try to optimize a large service in Go. They would just write it in C++ instead as soon as it starts to cost non-trivial amounts of money. Remember that Pike wrote Sawzall and Go replaces it, in a similar role.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Hmm, that seems a bit exaggerated. I seem to recall someone on the Go team describing the rewrite of a server that was originally in C++ and became much faster. (Largely because it started out at a heap of legacy code that was neglected for years.) That's probably pretty unusual, but the point is, just because it was written in C++ doesn't mean it's any good. Not everything gets serious attention from people who know what they're doing.
  - shereadsthenews 7y ago
    You are thinking of dl.google.com. It was a Go program that replaced a very old single-threaded C++ server (using the ancient SelectServer C++ core, deprecated at that time). The thing you have to realize about Google infrastructure is it does not require vertical scalability of its service backends. It is very typical to write a program and deploy it with 100 replicas having one CPU each on 100 different machines. A variety of load balancers (all written in C++, naturally) papers over the complexity. Nobody at Google expects a Go program to occupy an entire machine because Borg packs hundreds of services onto a single machine. The question is for _you_ do _you_ have Borg or another workload coordinator that allows you to do this? Or do you have "the database machine" and "the server" where you expect individual processes to scale up to many cores? BTW the reason dl.google.com rewrite was faster was not because it was in Go, it was because the C++ server was serving off its local disk and the rewrite was serving off a cluster file system with ~infinite I/O capabilities. Apples and oranges.
    - 7y ago

wbl 7y ago

For a company with supposedly high hiring standards. Granted domain knowledge also matters but that isn't what the people described have. So what does Google teach them?

erik_seaberg 7y ago
Everyone I met there had my respect. I find "not capable of understanding a brilliant language" to be baseless contempt and I'm surprised he didn't get more heat over it. I wouldn't work with him, nor whatever people he's trying in vain to accommodate.
- tensor 7y ago
  That's really quite ironic given: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19825787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19825787
  - erik_seaberg 7y ago
    I should have worded that more gently. The greatest programmers in the world have demonstrated that even they can't use C reliably.
- IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
  Yikes I think he is arguing against overwhelming programmers with complexity and the ability to hammer themselves with pointers, leaks and other banes of existence for average C programmers.

shereadsthenews 7y ago

That is taken out of context. Practically all Google server code is written in C++ or, at a much smaller scale, Java. Go is used for logs analysis, internal services, monitoring and automation, etc. Nobody at Google reaches for Go when they are thinking of high performance nor would anyone try to optimize a large service in Go. They would just write it in C++ instead as soon as it starts to cost non-trivial amounts of money. Remember that Pike wrote Sawzall and Go replaces it, in a similar role.

skybrian 7y ago
Hmm, that seems a bit exaggerated. I seem to recall someone on the Go team describing the rewrite of a server that was originally in C++ and became much faster. (Largely because it started out at a heap of legacy code that was neglected for years.) That's probably pretty unusual, but the point is, just because it was written in C++ doesn't mean it's any good. Not everything gets serious attention from people who know what they're doing.
- shereadsthenews 7y ago
  You are thinking of dl.google.com. It was a Go program that replaced a very old single-threaded C++ server (using the ancient SelectServer C++ core, deprecated at that time). The thing you have to realize about Google infrastructure is it does not require vertical scalability of its service backends. It is very typical to write a program and deploy it with 100 replicas having one CPU each on 100 different machines. A variety of load balancers (all written in C++, naturally) papers over the complexity. Nobody at Google expects a Go program to occupy an entire machine because Borg packs hundreds of services onto a single machine. The question is for _you_ do _you_ have Borg or another workload coordinator that allows you to do this? Or do you have "the database machine" and "the server" where you expect individual processes to scale up to many cores? BTW the reason dl.google.com rewrite was faster was not because it was in Go, it was because the C++ server was serving off its local disk and the rewrite was serving off a cluster file system with ~infinite I/O capabilities. Apples and oranges.
  - 7y ago