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Suggestion: While your paper is very intellectual and I laud that, perhaps what would work better for mass uptake is to create your own programming language aro
by peter_d_sherman 6y ago
Suggestion: While your paper is very intellectual and I laud that, perhaps what would work better for mass uptake is to create your own programming language around the concepts you propose, and let people try that language. You could call this language "Featherweight Go" if you wish, but perhaps it would be better to call it something else entirely, and simply state that that this new language
was inspired by Go.
This choice comes with potential business, legal, and other ramifications, for example, should Google get all of the benefit, in terms of fame, goodwill, users and other intrinsic bonuses from the work you've done; or could you profit (if that was your goal) if you were to create your own company around this new language?
You see, that's what I mean by potential business and legal issues.
Oftentimes, people who are employed by other people work extremely hard on academic pursuits, such as academic papers, yet their work is never adequately rewarded, compensated, or even appreciated.
Which is why I suggest you create your own language and possibly your own company around that language. Because otherwise you'll never know nor understand the true economic value of what you've created, and you might spend an eternity trying to convince people who are of lesser intelligence to read your paper, whereas they could be using, downloading, telling their friends about the great new language you created; and maybe even paying you money, if you played your cards right...
Note that I am not suggesting you go this route (it's your decision, maybe you just want to bring better free open source software to the open source community and that's highly laudable), all I'm saying is, you might be on your bed on your 85th birthday, and you might look back at your life, and you might wonder "boy, I wonder what would have happened had I tried to start a company around this set of ideas; I wonder what would have happened if I had taken the road not travelled.."
That's all I'm trying to say...
Nothing more, nothing less.
Your choice.
Make it wisely.
Your paper shows tons of intellect.
- platinumrad 6y agoWhat are you talking about... Two members of the Go team are on the author list.
- peter_d_sherman 6y agoIf I were them, I'd leave Google and start my own programming language company. I can't speak for them of course, but that's what I would do if I were in their position.
- baby 6y agothat's one hell of an off-topic comment if I've seen one
- talideon 6y agoYou appear to have entirely missed the point of the paper. This is an exploration of a mechanism for implementing generics in Go in the future. It's not a proposal for a new programming language. The "Featherweight Go" referred to in the paper is simply a tiny subset of the Go language itself that's being used as a framework for formalising the mechanism they're proposing could be used.