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Are you suggesting all new typed languages have generics? What makes you so sure there isn't room in the design space for a typed language without generics? As

by eeh 6y ago

Are you suggesting all new typed languages have generics? What makes you so sure there isn't room in the design space for a typed language without generics? As much as I like generics, Go's popularity is a success: programmers have spoken, and they value other things more than generics. Hindsight is 20/20, and even this isn't a commitment to introduce generics in Go.

jdub 6y ago
"programmers have spoken, and they"...'ve done quite a lot of work to get the benefits of generics without language support. You can pretty much look at any large Go project (famously Kubernetes) and see a workaround of some shape or form.
- smarterclayton 6y ago
  Kubernetes has lots of workarounds - I’m not sure generics are the ones I’ve worried about the most. If I had to write a list of “tools I would have preferred to have”: 1. Perfect serialization libraries - Serde is the gold standard here, and IIRC the macro system from Rust is as important a part of it as the traits part. 2. Mutability of types in shared caches - to build efficient controller patterns you need fast and efficient caches - an immutable type that protects against mutation would have saved a lot of ugly mutation testing code 3. Client library definitions shared across types - we could have reduced a fair amount of boilerplate with generics, although most bugs are in the serialization part these days as types evolve But most of these are dwarfed by the need to scale reviewer time across hundreds of people submitting PRs that change fundamentals of the code. The simplicity of Go and ability to review stupid, obvious, absolutely critical code is the reason why I love it. Having a strong way to reduce cleverness has been a godsend. It doesn’t mean cleverness is bad, or I don’t want more tools in Go. But I appreciate that aspect of Go in a way that others may not. Edit: I have been watching kube-rs mature, but to get the same level of scale and performance we’d have to reproduce the shared index informers and that’s a lot of drudge work to get right. That’s one place where someone motivated could really help Rust become a first place way to extend Kubernetes, which would be exciting.
  - entha_saava 6y ago
    Hacker News law: In every thread about Go someone will bring up rust. Don't mind.
    - uluyol 6y ago
      The comment you are replying to was written by one of Red Hat's lead kubernetes developers (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/graphs/contributors https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/graphs/contributors).
- saturn_vk 6y ago
  While k8s's code is atrocious, I wonder if that isn't due to its legacy translation from Java (iirc, it was written in it initially)
  - smarterclayton 6y ago
    Kubernetes had a non-public prototype in Java. None of the code in the main tree even resembles the code from that prototype (I was one of the first non-googlers to contribute). It’s just ugly because that’s how it evolved after a community formed and that’s what real evolved software looks like. :)
pjmlp 6y ago
Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Both its main influences, Oberon-2 and Limbo had zero traction on the market, and Limbo not only is quite close to Go, it had an whole OS full of the Plan 9 ideas to come along, yet it failed on the market. Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem. > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three problems to fix in the language. https://blog.golang.org/why-generics https://blog.golang.org/why-generics And yes, there is no place on the 21st century for typed languages without generics, we already have enough of them from the previous century already. CLU and ML, the first languages to support genericity are from the mid-70's, they are older than C++ and contemporary to C.
- icholy 6y ago
  > Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Why isn't Dart seeing the same type of success?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Because it was dropped on the floor by the Chrome team, which lead to the original team leaving Google, if they had shipped Dartium the outcome would be much different.
- jstarks 6y ago
  Is Dart's lack of popularity in spite of its author's employer, then?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Because it was dropped on the floor by the Chrome team, which lead to the original team leaving Google. Original Go team did not suffer from this.
  - pcwalton 6y ago
    Dart's lack of popularity is indeed in spite of the Google backing. I basically see two reasons. First, though Lars Bak has an impressive pedigree, Strongtalk and V8 aren't as well-known as Plan 9 and Unix. Moreover, rightly or wrongly, Dart had the appearance of "Google's attempt to kill JS", which neither endeared it to Web developers (who were riding a wave of JavaScript hype at the time) nor to other browser manufacturers (who were growing increasingly distrustful of Google's initiatives).
meddlepal 6y ago
Go is popular because Google enjoys shoving it down our throats not because it is a particularly good language. Not saying it is a bad language, but it really helps that Go had Google's blessing.
- icholy 6y ago
  > Go is popular because Google enjoys shoving it down our throats How exactly is Google "shoving it down our throats"?
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  Strange. I get the impression that Google's support for Go is rather half hearted. Or perhaps Google has many hearts and no one knows exactly how many or where they are at any given point in time :-)

by eeh 6y ago

jdub 6y ago

"programmers have spoken, and they"...'ve done quite a lot of work to get the benefits of generics without language support. You can pretty much look at any large Go project (famously Kubernetes) and see a workaround of some shape or form.

smarterclayton 6y ago
Kubernetes has lots of workarounds - I’m not sure generics are the ones I’ve worried about the most. If I had to write a list of “tools I would have preferred to have”: 1. Perfect serialization libraries - Serde is the gold standard here, and IIRC the macro system from Rust is as important a part of it as the traits part. 2. Mutability of types in shared caches - to build efficient controller patterns you need fast and efficient caches - an immutable type that protects against mutation would have saved a lot of ugly mutation testing code 3. Client library definitions shared across types - we could have reduced a fair amount of boilerplate with generics, although most bugs are in the serialization part these days as types evolve But most of these are dwarfed by the need to scale reviewer time across hundreds of people submitting PRs that change fundamentals of the code. The simplicity of Go and ability to review stupid, obvious, absolutely critical code is the reason why I love it. Having a strong way to reduce cleverness has been a godsend. It doesn’t mean cleverness is bad, or I don’t want more tools in Go. But I appreciate that aspect of Go in a way that others may not. Edit: I have been watching kube-rs mature, but to get the same level of scale and performance we’d have to reproduce the shared index informers and that’s a lot of drudge work to get right. That’s one place where someone motivated could really help Rust become a first place way to extend Kubernetes, which would be exciting.
- entha_saava 6y ago
  Hacker News law: In every thread about Go someone will bring up rust. Don't mind.
  - uluyol 6y ago
    The comment you are replying to was written by one of Red Hat's lead kubernetes developers (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/graphs/contributors https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/graphs/contributors).
saturn_vk 6y ago
While k8s's code is atrocious, I wonder if that isn't due to its legacy translation from Java (iirc, it was written in it initially)
- smarterclayton 6y ago
  Kubernetes had a non-public prototype in Java. None of the code in the main tree even resembles the code from that prototype (I was one of the first non-googlers to contribute). It’s just ugly because that’s how it evolved after a community formed and that’s what real evolved software looks like. :)

pjmlp 6y ago

Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Both its main influences, Oberon-2 and Limbo had zero traction on the market, and Limbo not only is quite close to Go, it had an whole OS full of the Plan 9 ideas to come along, yet it failed on the market. Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem. > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three problems to fix in the language. https://blog.golang.org/why-generics https://blog.golang.org/why-generics And yes, there is no place on the 21st century for typed languages without generics, we already have enough of them from the previous century already. CLU and ML, the first languages to support genericity are from the mid-70's, they are older than C++ and contemporary to C.

icholy 6y ago
> Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Why isn't Dart seeing the same type of success?
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Because it was dropped on the floor by the Chrome team, which lead to the original team leaving Google, if they had shipped Dartium the outcome would be much different.
jstarks 6y ago
Is Dart's lack of popularity in spite of its author's employer, then?
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Because it was dropped on the floor by the Chrome team, which lead to the original team leaving Google. Original Go team did not suffer from this.
- pcwalton 6y ago
  Dart's lack of popularity is indeed in spite of the Google backing. I basically see two reasons. First, though Lars Bak has an impressive pedigree, Strongtalk and V8 aren't as well-known as Plan 9 and Unix. Moreover, rightly or wrongly, Dart had the appearance of "Google's attempt to kill JS", which neither endeared it to Web developers (who were riding a wave of JavaScript hype at the time) nor to other browser manufacturers (who were growing increasingly distrustful of Google's initiatives).

meddlepal 6y ago

Go is popular because Google enjoys shoving it down our throats not because it is a particularly good language. Not saying it is a bad language, but it really helps that Go had Google's blessing.

icholy 6y ago
> Go is popular because Google enjoys shoving it down our throats How exactly is Google "shoving it down our throats"?
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
Strange. I get the impression that Google's support for Go is rather half hearted. Or perhaps Google has many hearts and no one knows exactly how many or where they are at any given point in time :-)