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I don't use Go much to have an actual opinion on this. I actually like Go because I built my data science blog on top of it (learned a bit of CSS and html along
by SpaceManNabs 7y ago
I don't use Go much to have an actual opinion on this. I actually like Go because I built my data science blog on top of it (learned a bit of CSS and html along the way).
But I think the final paragraph of this post only serves to highlight an issue brought up in the original post by Mr. Siebenmann.
The rebuttal says:
"There are certainly senses in which Go is Google's language: it was created at Google, Google continues to fund most of the development, and a few people at Google are the final deciders about the language itself."
I understand that the language can be owned by Google and the community, but the original take was:
"You could ask if Go is Google's language or the Go core team's language, since Go's direction is set and controlled by that small core team. However, at the moment I believe that most or all of the active Go core team is employed by Google, making the distinction impossibly to determine in practice (at least from outside Google). In practice we'll only get a chance to find out who Go really belongs to if Go core team members start leaving Google and try to remain active in determining Go's direction."
Seems like the rebuttal's concluding statement doesn't really address the biggest concerns.
The rebuttal continues to say that the development team tries to work with the community when possible. The original discussion here on HackerNews brought up examples where that is not always the case. I don't think a BDFL or a team acting as BDFL is a bad thing inherently, but I don't think this rebuttal really talks to the issues.
I once wanted to build a bunch of ML tools for Golang. Like coding up UMAP or other dimensionality reduction techniques, introducing some variational techniques, etc. But the package manager situation at the time (I thought of doing this 2 years ago) scared me off!
edit: I thought about this and did form a slight opinion on this article only. If we were to change the opening and concluding paragraph only (and retain the rest of the contents), it should have been titled "Go is Google's Language, and that is ok!" And then added a paragraph on how Google possibly abandoning the project wouldn't cripple it.
- Lowkeyloki 7y agoDoesn't seem like much of a rebuttal at all, does it?
- ummonk 7y agoIn fairness, it didn’t really claim to rebut the post, just add further context to it.
- xbmcuser 7y agoHe does not need to rebut anyway go is language created by googlers for a need they had and they open sourced it. If it does not meets anyones development requirements they can use another language or fork it and do the changes themselves. There are so many community driven open source projects one of the most used is Kodi and if you have spent any time on it's repo you can see that the maintainers set a hardline on what their vision is and what code they are willing to accept. Funnily enough an argument is going on at the moment where Kodi maintainers want to remove all hardware specific hacks in future versions and some dev opposed to it. What do you think will happen?
- Lowkeyloki 7y agoThe original title on HN used the word "rebuttal". It appears to have been changed.