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Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your
by c3534l 7y ago
Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had made Go, no one would be using it right now. Network effects matter in languages. People want all the upsides of the network effects (i.e. the ecosystem and adoption), but none of the downsides (it's propped up by a big company with massive network effects).
- objektif 7y agoIs that really true though? What abiut python and javascript for example? Did they have a giant corp behind them?
- zemo 7y ago... Python was led by a Google employee for seven years.
- rzzzt 7y agoOne of the first languages supported on App Engine was Python, IIRC.
- objektif 7y agoDoes it matter where the person worked? Python definitely was not Google’s or any other corp’s.
- zemo 7y agoGoogle employed the primary maintainer of Python and paid him to work on it. You asked "did they have a giant corp behind them", the subtext there being that you could complete the sentence "as Go does". I'm merely pointing out that your example of Python is strikingly similar to Guido Van Rossum working at Google while he was BDFL of Python
- joemi 7y agoOf course it matters. That's the whole reason the Go Is Google's Language post exists. And the whole reason the response exists, and this very comment thread, too.
- objektif 7y agoAbsolutely not. It is one thing to create a language and maontain it and another to hire someone who created a language some years ago.
- joemi 7y agofrom the post: > There was no mandate or suggestion from Google management or executives that Google should develop a programming language. For many years, including well after the open source release, I doubt any Google executives had more than a vague awareness of the existence of Go
- objektif 7y agoThat is a ver very strong assumption. Just because Google did not explicitly have a ‘GO’ team does not mean they did not support it. I assume Google became aware of it the moment their employees started using it for something useful. People have bosses who have bosses. At whoch point they decided to let their employees continue working on it.
- emmelaich 7y agoGo exists because Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and others are allowed the latitude to make it. You can be sure that whatever they do gets a high profile without it in any way being "supported" or "official"
- dudus 7y agoIt would be more correct to say Google hired the leader of Python and he worked there for 7 years
- joemi 7y agoIs there really much practical difference between that and Go? From the Ian Lance Taylor response: > There was no mandate or suggestion from Google management or executives that Google should develop a programming language. For many years, including well after the open source release, I doubt any Google executives had more than a vague awareness of the existence of Go
- walterstucco 7y agoIt's Google's fault if python is so widespread No Google, no Python Imagine it
- dpc_pw 7y agoWasn't it Google that heavily used Python that popularized it a lot? And JS was born and evolved with the browser.
- danieldk 7y agoPython was picked up by companies like Red Hat at the end of the nineties (e.g. in the Anaconda installer). So in Linux circles Python had already gained quite a bit of popularity.
- rusk 7y agoJavascript was Netscape, and adopted by various other megacorps (such ad Microsoft and ... Google) over the years in various guises.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dtech 7y agoIt certainly is in the last decade or so. Python is a language from the early nineties and took decades to achieve it's current level of popularity. Javascript was backed by Netscape, and later by Microsoft/IE. It would never have succeeded without corporate backing and being on of the 2.5 usable languages on the web (Java was the other one, I'm counting ActiveX/VBScript as half)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- benesch 7y agoJavaScript is an interesting case, in that it was the only way to write code that would run in Netscape Navigator at the time. In a sense it had Netscape behind it, and then it had Microsoft behind it once they reverse-engineered an implementation for IE3. I'm not very familiar with the history of Python, though it seems it was funded in its early years by various research institutes that employed Guido van Rossum, rather than a giant corporation.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tacosx 7y agoI know of more than one organization that have decided against Angular in recent years primarily because of Google's backing of the project. Skepticism of the big three (four?) tech giants is growing, especially if you've had some of your market carved out by them.
- toasterlovin 7y agoYehuda Katz said something a while ago that stuck with me. He likened Ember’s community model to Postgres. That is, relatively small levels of support from lots of different organizations. I think there’s a lot of wisdom is such an approach.
- bradleyjg 7y agoIt’s open development vs open source.
- Rerarom 7y agoWhat about Ruby?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- iamgopal 7y agoBasecamp.
- toasterlovin 7y agoBasecamp supports Rails. Ruby is mostly developed by a community of Japanese developers.
- pablodh 7y agoBasecamp is minuscule next to Google.
- verisimilidude 7y agoJapan. With roots in Japan, Ruby was very popular throughout Asia in the earlier days of the language, before Rails. Granted, this support was perhaps more cultural than corporate. There's something to be said for a community that grows in your own backyard, has significant documentation in your native language(s), etc.
- stevewilhelm 7y agoAs of 2011, Matsumoto is the Chief Architect of Ruby at Heroku, an online cloud platform-as-a-service in San Francisco. He is a fellow of Rakuten Institute of Technology, a research and development organisation in Rakuten Inc. He was appointed to the role of technical advisor for VASILY, Inc. starting in June 2014. - From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto Heroku was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2010.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 0815test 7y ago> ...but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's a C-like language with GC, that compiles to native code supported by an efficient runtime, and can work effectively with parallel/concurrent code. In many ways it's Java done right, or a more intuitive (and from certain POVs, preferable) alternative to Haskell and Ocaml. That would seem to be enough to drive adoption.
- apta 7y ago> In many ways it's Java done right Not quite: * no generics * error prone error handling * non tunable GC * null pointers * golang interfaces are messy and can't be used to tag structures * golang time package is garbage and lots more Java today is superior to golang in almost every front.
- grumpydba 7y agoMemory usage, compile time, simplicity, readability and deployment story are notable fronts in which go is several miles ahead.
- apta 7y agoJava will use however much memory is assigned to it, since it defaults to throughput performance (though now with G1 and Shenandoah that can also be tuned)[1]. Compilation times are not that different, especially when using incremental compilation. I worked on large projects in both languages, and for any non-trivial code base, the difference isn't that far off. I'd argue that readability is better in Java due to things like non-clutter due to error handling, and the existence of generics. Deployment has been solved for a while now with building shadow jars[1]. [1] Not to mention offerings like: https://quarkus.io/ https://quarkus.io/
- grumpydba 7y agoYou mention a lot of workarounds and knobs though. And the excessive use of layers of abstractions in the Java world is scary.
- edoceo 7y agoJust like the inventor of the other language Go. They even filed am early bug asking G to change the name. Folk were using that Go, but they would use the Google Go.
- javajosh 7y ago> You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real Counter-examples: Clojure, Elm.
- iends 7y agoSorry, but those languages don't really have adoption outside of small echo chambers.
- DiseasedBadger 7y agoI've heard about those before. What are they?
- devbat8712 7y agoclojure is lisp on the jvm. not sure about elm.
- mesaframe 7y agoI think they were being sarcastic.
- devbat8712 7y agooh, duh.
- patosai 7y agoElm is a JS framework for rendering views. It has a type system and guarantees no runtime errors while being fast. The language compiles into JS. https://elm-lang.org/ https://elm-lang.org/
- booleandilemma 7y agoIf I had made Go, no one would be using it right now. It would be really frustrating for you, because assuming people found out about your language in the first place, it would be shot down for not having generics (or something else), and there wouldn’t be any Google fanboys to come defend it. So much of what’s popular is determined by which company is backing it, whether people want to admit that or not. Pure bandwagoning.
- bigtunacan 7y agoHistory doesn't really support that. PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml, Lua. Successful programming languages seem to come in equal measures from both large corporate backers and not. There is certainly the need for network effects which large corporations often can provide more consistently, but we have seen plenty of examples within the space where individuals or smaller companies have been successful in providing these same network effects.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gchamonlive 7y agoin the early 90s the languages had to provide fewer features to be considered adoptable. Once people adopted that language they had to expand it. Nowadays if you want to create a new language there is a minimum set of features everybody expects that raises the complexity quite high. You could just create a bare language but who would adopt that?
- spamizbad 7y agoIsn't that kind of what Elixir and Clojure did? Neither language is festooned with bells and whistles and both leveraged the Erlang VM and JVM respectively to assist in bootstrapping their ecosystems.
- verttii 7y agoActually, Elixir did add the bells and whistles to Erlang, sort of. That is pretty much the whole point of Elixir.
- paublyrne 7y agoI assume OP meant that Elixir is a purposefully small language. It taps into a lot of functionality in Erlang without necessarily re-implementing it. There isn't even a wrapper around the Erlang :sleep function.
- pictur 7y agoI don't think so. The better the core team in programming languages, the better the future of the language.
- smnscu 7y ago> If I had made Go, no one would be using it right now. This made me think of this (thank you for reminding me about it, by the way): https://vlang.io/ https://vlang.io/ Really looking forward to see where Alex will take this project.
- sagichmal 7y agoThis is vaporware.
- amedvednikov 7y agoHow is it "vaporware" when it's been available for the public for more than a month now? :)
- sagichmal 7y agoShow me a link to the source, and a way to run it myself. I certainly can't find it.
- zemo 7y ago> Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language is that actually true or is that true of a vocal minority? I've been using Go since 2011 and I'm perfectly happy that it's Google's language; I'm happy to mooch off of their investments. In my seven-plus years of using Go I have never encountered a Go programmer in real life that is actually mad about this.
- joemi 7y agoI think the "everyone" in that statement refers to those who are upset. It probably could have been more accurately phrased as "People are upset that Go is Google's language..." As to your not encountering a Go programmer who's mad about this, I think that's because you're considering people who are already programming in Go. I suspect people who care never actually start using Go because of their thoughts on Google's involvement. (For the record, I too am fine with it, especially after reading Ian Lance Taylor's response.)
- zemo 7y ago> I think that's because you're considering people who are already programming in Go um I talk to a lot of programmers that don't use Go. Most that don't use it decide not to use it because of either the type system ("it's not safe/expressive enough") or the garbage collector. I've never talked to someone that said "Go is technically good and I think it would be a good tool but I won't use it because of Google".
- joemi 7y agoThat's fair. I only made that assumption because you specifically said "I have never encountered a Go programmer in real life that is actually mad about this"
- zemo 7y agoah yeah makes sense. Honestly "I have never encountered someone that doesn't use Go because of this, or a Go programmer that's mad about it" is probably a more complete sentiment.
- fredmorcos 7y ago> Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. I guess because it does not merit that adoption. The only reason it gets attention at all is either 1) "oh it's made by the same people who made UNIX and C and UTF-8", or 2) "oh it's made by Google".
- rlonn 7y agoPleasing all pleases noone. Successful products and projects come from a vision that is executed with discipline. Design by committee never works if the committee reaches a certain size. Instead of whining and trying to sabotage Go, why don't you fork it and apply your misguided product management ideas to the soon-to-be-forgotten fork instead? Applause to the Go core team, inside Google or outside it, for creating a great language. Please keep it up!
- zzzcpan 7y ago> Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. Brand recognition is not that important for programming languages. It does skew decisions a bit, but people still have to make too many of them when moving to another programming language, so the effect is not that significant. Go just happened to hit all the right spots for many programmers at the time and a bit of marketing turned that into some adoption.