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100% agree. To a very real extent, Go probably only exists at all because Google poured an infinite amount of effort into Unladen Swallow--a project designed to

by saurik 6y ago

100% agree. To a very real extent, Go probably only exists at all because Google poured an infinite amount of effort into Unladen Swallow--a project designed to remove the GIL from Python 2 to make it more usable for concurrent programs and add an LLVM-based JIT compiler to improve performance--and Python's response was to not only not merge it, but to break the entire Python ecosystem for a decade by forking the language... while somehow leaving "concurrency" and "performance" off the list of goals while making their backwards incompatible change (which of course also destroyed all the work on Unladen Swallow); hell: early versions of Python 3 were benchmarking universally slower than Python 2 :/. Google seems to have "gotten the hint", and around the same time (2009) hired Rob Pike to do Go, and has since "moved on" from Python and taken a massive part of the ecosystem of users Python used to have with it (the rest having bailed for node.js; remember when Python was the future of web development, competing with Ruby thanks to Django? those were the days): people still use Python, but it is now an entirely different crop of data scientists and AI people... all of whom are starting to run into the performance issues in even their glue layer, and so if the Swift tensorflow efforts ever work out, Python is done.

uranusjr 6y ago
Didn’t the original Go creators mention on multiple occasions they intended to build a replacement to C, only accidentally produced an application language? Assuming that’s true, Go would have happened regardless. Google couldn’t have pulled out of Unladen Swallow before Go is usable, since they could not have known it’s actually an alternative at the time.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  C++ actually, but most of us did not care. https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti... If this version of generics finally makes it, then I care, otherwise only when dealing with Docker and Kubernetes eco-system.
hitekker 6y ago
Huh, I was wondering why Unladen Swallow faded rapidly since 2009 and why Python seems secondary at Google compared to Java and Go. Silence and distance seems to be a common echo of failed projects.
rhencke 6y ago
Google did not hire Rob Pike with Go in mind. Go did not even come around as an idea until Pike had worked at Google for a while. [1] Don't forget Rob Pike created Sawzall at Google first (2005). [2] [1] https://golang.org/doc/faq#history https://golang.org/doc/faq#history [2] https://research.google/pubs/pub61/ https://research.google/pubs/pub61/
- fnord123 6y ago
  The early Go compiler reused the code generator from Limbo. To the point that many comments referred to Limbo. So while Rob Pike might not have joined Google to work on Go or had Go in mind, the idea and direction for Go was probably preordained. It doesn't really support or attack your claims. It's just a thing I wanted to share.
  - fnord123 6y ago
    Small mistake: there are references to inferno, the operating system which limbo was a key component in. The broad idea is the same: Go has a clear heritage in systems that Rob Pike already worked on.
petters 6y ago
> Google poured an infinite amount of effort into Unladen Swallow Google most certainly did not.
jnwatson 6y ago
There's so little truth in this it is hard to know where to start.
jashmatthews 6y ago
Unladen Swallow was only an internship project. http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospective.html http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospect...
N1H1L 6y ago
The glue layers speedups are really bothering me. I absolutely fail to understand how a data science heavy language in 2020 can have such convoluted parallel processing. Dask, numba, joblib all are unfinished projects and absolutely not headache-free. CuPy works great, but it is not multi-GPU capable as of today. And anytime you point this out, people will trot out a toy problem in Cython and try to prove you wrong, which has zero relevance to real world issues. Hell, Cython cannot even compile something as basic as Numpy FFTs, something that is absolutely critical in signal processing.
dnr 6y ago
As other people have pointed out, almost none of this comment is accurate: Google put some effort, not that much, into Unladen Swallow, and the people who worked on it admitted that it didn't achieve the goals they set. The Python community was well on their way to creating Python 3 before work started on Unladen Swallow (so it was not in any way "Python's response"). As other comments pointed out, Google did not hire Rob Pike to "do" Go. Go was initially a side project of a few people and had nothing whatsoever to do with Python. The Go team was surprised when Python users started migrating to it. Google never used Python for web development, with one major exception, Youtube, an acquisition. I also don't understand how Google has "moved on" from Python (this seems unlikely) and how what they use Python for internally has anything at all to do with the fate of Django and Python webdev. I don't mean to pile on, but I kinda have to ask, what were you thinking when you wrote this comment? Do you believe all those statements, or were you taking huge liberties with facts and making guesses to tell a story that supports a statement you wanted to make? You seem like a valued member of the community and this kinda makes me distrust the accuracy of everything else you write. (And to be honest, makes me distrust more of what I read in general, which is probably good but sad.) A couple references for history/dates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython#Unladen_Swallow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython#Unladen_Swallow https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/

by saurik 6y ago

uranusjr 6y ago

Didn’t the original Go creators mention on multiple occasions they intended to build a replacement to C, only accidentally produced an application language? Assuming that’s true, Go would have happened regardless. Google couldn’t have pulled out of Unladen Swallow before Go is usable, since they could not have known it’s actually an alternative at the time.

pjmlp 6y ago
C++ actually, but most of us did not care. https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti... If this version of generics finally makes it, then I care, otherwise only when dealing with Docker and Kubernetes eco-system.

hitekker 6y ago

Huh, I was wondering why Unladen Swallow faded rapidly since 2009 and why Python seems secondary at Google compared to Java and Go. Silence and distance seems to be a common echo of failed projects.

rhencke 6y ago

Google did not hire Rob Pike with Go in mind. Go did not even come around as an idea until Pike had worked at Google for a while. [1] Don't forget Rob Pike created Sawzall at Google first (2005). [2] [1] https://golang.org/doc/faq#history https://golang.org/doc/faq#history [2] https://research.google/pubs/pub61/ https://research.google/pubs/pub61/

fnord123 6y ago
The early Go compiler reused the code generator from Limbo. To the point that many comments referred to Limbo. So while Rob Pike might not have joined Google to work on Go or had Go in mind, the idea and direction for Go was probably preordained. It doesn't really support or attack your claims. It's just a thing I wanted to share.
- fnord123 6y ago
  Small mistake: there are references to inferno, the operating system which limbo was a key component in. The broad idea is the same: Go has a clear heritage in systems that Rob Pike already worked on.

petters 6y ago

> Google poured an infinite amount of effort into Unladen Swallow Google most certainly did not.

jnwatson 6y ago

There's so little truth in this it is hard to know where to start.

jashmatthews 6y ago

Unladen Swallow was only an internship project. http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospective.html http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospect...

N1H1L 6y ago

The glue layers speedups are really bothering me. I absolutely fail to understand how a data science heavy language in 2020 can have such convoluted parallel processing. Dask, numba, joblib all are unfinished projects and absolutely not headache-free. CuPy works great, but it is not multi-GPU capable as of today. And anytime you point this out, people will trot out a toy problem in Cython and try to prove you wrong, which has zero relevance to real world issues. Hell, Cython cannot even compile something as basic as Numpy FFTs, something that is absolutely critical in signal processing.

dnr 6y ago

As other people have pointed out, almost none of this comment is accurate: Google put some effort, not that much, into Unladen Swallow, and the people who worked on it admitted that it didn't achieve the goals they set. The Python community was well on their way to creating Python 3 before work started on Unladen Swallow (so it was not in any way "Python's response"). As other comments pointed out, Google did not hire Rob Pike to "do" Go. Go was initially a side project of a few people and had nothing whatsoever to do with Python. The Go team was surprised when Python users started migrating to it. Google never used Python for web development, with one major exception, Youtube, an acquisition. I also don't understand how Google has "moved on" from Python (this seems unlikely) and how what they use Python for internally has anything at all to do with the fate of Django and Python webdev. I don't mean to pile on, but I kinda have to ask, what were you thinking when you wrote this comment? Do you believe all those statements, or were you taking huge liberties with facts and making guesses to tell a story that supports a statement you wanted to make? You seem like a valued member of the community and this kinda makes me distrust the accuracy of everything else you write. (And to be honest, makes me distrust more of what I read in general, which is probably good but sad.) A couple references for history/dates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython#Unladen_Swallow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython#Unladen_Swallow https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/