4 ms·

Maybe you are just concerned with Go, but there are similar instances in Java, Swift, Rust and maybe others too. Every big company sponsored language is like th

by geodel 6y ago

Maybe you are just concerned with Go, but there are similar instances in Java, Swift, Rust and maybe others too. Every big company sponsored language is like that. > I like the language and the team are clearly talented but it is a pity that the project is quite so proprietary. To me it seems like nature of things. People who are talented and in control are just not going to take any contribution come their way. For people outside if their thinking aligned with core team they will feel welcome and others will feel unwelcome due to high handedness of core team.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I dunno about Java, it's often cited as a design-by-committee failure of a language, and it took years to escape it. It did not have a singular owner but a number of very large, very bureaucratic and very rich companies with vested interests. In my outsider's perspective, this caused the language to effectively deadlock for the better part of a decade. Go in the meantime is chooching along gradually, trying hard not to do anything too big in one go. Modules was the big thing this year, and people are still adjusting and transitioning. Generics MIGHT be the next big thing (idk if the draft design is finished, approved, and work on implementing it is underway). But they spent years considering, humming and hawing, objecting, polling and reconsidering this particular one. They could have pushed for it much harder and much earlier on, but they wanted for the language to settle first, for use cases to be discovered, etc. They learned from the past, e.g. Java's implementation, and how it added so much complexity to the language spec, compiler, and all the build tooling - which they really wanted to avoid, because of the use cases of Go as a language and the problems it wanted to avoid (including complicated and slow compilation).
- geodel 6y ago
  Java had /EE part which was much more designed by committee. Oracle last year dumped that on to Eclipse foundation. Now Java release is every 6 months like Go and it looks lot less designed by committee.
yakubin 6y ago
> Maybe you are just concerned with Go, but there are similar instances in Java, Swift, Rust and maybe others too. Every big company sponsored language is like that. How is that true about Rust? Mozilla fired people working on Rust. Now there's a foundation and from the looks of it there are lots of contributions from individual contributors coming through GitHub.
- geodel 6y ago
  Check the history of Rust package management. Who wrote it first time and how it was dumped.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    Which "first time" are you referring to? Lots of people forget the very early package management efforts, and so it's not clear to me if you're referring to that or to something else. More specifically, which of the various systems are you referring to? (listed here in chronological order) * Cargo * rustpkg * cargo-lite * Cargo (yes, there have been two different Cargos....)
barnacled 6y ago
I think you're strawmanning/misunderstanding me a bit to say 'just not going to take any contribution come their way'. I never suggested they ought to, the point is they seem NEVER to take any significant contribution from outside the Google team, like at all. >For people outside if their thinking aligned with core team they will feel welcome and others will feel unwelcome due to high handedness of core team. No, whether you align or not major contributions are not accepted. See the godep vs. go modules debacle for example. And again, that's all fine with me, and I can see why they'd operate that way, but they claim not to which is my major beef (and allow people to work very hard at contributing without realising it's not going to get them anywhere).
- throwaway34241 6y ago
  I think there’s been largish contributions to the compiler (webassembly backend etc) done by external people. For language changes, don’t they have a formal proposal process where someone submits a spec and the the team (and community) provides feedback before changes are accepted? If you accept that’s reasonable it explains some of how things have happened with dep and generics. If I remember right dep was becoming a de-facto standard without ever submitting to the proposal process where the Go team could address their technical differences. Obviously there was a messaging failure here and they could have emphasized that it was not formally accepted, but it’s tough to tell people not to use a major improvement to the status quo when there is no alternative to point to and hasn’t been for years. For language changes so far there’s been almost zero changes approved, by anyone, including the core team, so it’s hard to make a comparison. But if you look at the current generics proposal it’s an enormous amount of work to completely specify. As far as I know, there have been zero actual proposals by the community and several by the core team (most of which were rejected). I think the community sentiment has been more that we should have generics, or “wouldn’t this feature be useful” on the issue tracker without fully fleshing it out, not actually making formal proposals and getting shot down.
  - barnacled 6y ago
    Nothing core though, and the godep thing is disputed by those involved - https://twitter.com/sdboyer/status/1034893100450291713 https://twitter.com/sdboyer/status/1034893100450291713 - more or less they got passed over after spending a bunch of time on it. It's complicated and there was miscommunication but it forms part of the pattern. I'm pretty sure there's been several different proposals for generics. And I seriously doubt anybody external to the go team submitting even an identical draft would be listened to. Lots of discussion documented at https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/ExperienceReports#generics https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/ExperienceReports#generics e.g. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vrAy9gMpMoS3uaVphB32uVXX4pi-HnNjkMEgyAHX4N4/edit# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vrAy9gMpMoS3uaVphB32uVXX... Even the tracker issue at https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292 states 'he intent is not to add generics to Go at this time, but rather to show people what a complete proposal would look like' - does that sound like they're open to an external person proposing it? I saw it even on a small scale back in 2011, back then I knew the generics thing would be solely implemented by the google guys. There is clearly a 'not invented here syndrome' going on which is entirely understandable actually for a programming language, I just wish there was more transparency on it. The second a core language change actually involves a person external to google or the team drop the concept that that could happen I'll withdraw my criticism.

by geodel 6y ago

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I dunno about Java, it's often cited as a design-by-committee failure of a language, and it took years to escape it. It did not have a singular owner but a number of very large, very bureaucratic and very rich companies with vested interests. In my outsider's perspective, this caused the language to effectively deadlock for the better part of a decade. Go in the meantime is chooching along gradually, trying hard not to do anything too big in one go. Modules was the big thing this year, and people are still adjusting and transitioning. Generics MIGHT be the next big thing (idk if the draft design is finished, approved, and work on implementing it is underway). But they spent years considering, humming and hawing, objecting, polling and reconsidering this particular one. They could have pushed for it much harder and much earlier on, but they wanted for the language to settle first, for use cases to be discovered, etc. They learned from the past, e.g. Java's implementation, and how it added so much complexity to the language spec, compiler, and all the build tooling - which they really wanted to avoid, because of the use cases of Go as a language and the problems it wanted to avoid (including complicated and slow compilation).

geodel 6y ago
Java had /EE part which was much more designed by committee. Oracle last year dumped that on to Eclipse foundation. Now Java release is every 6 months like Go and it looks lot less designed by committee.

yakubin 6y ago

> Maybe you are just concerned with Go, but there are similar instances in Java, Swift, Rust and maybe others too. Every big company sponsored language is like that. How is that true about Rust? Mozilla fired people working on Rust. Now there's a foundation and from the looks of it there are lots of contributions from individual contributors coming through GitHub.

geodel 6y ago
Check the history of Rust package management. Who wrote it first time and how it was dumped.
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  Which "first time" are you referring to? Lots of people forget the very early package management efforts, and so it's not clear to me if you're referring to that or to something else. More specifically, which of the various systems are you referring to? (listed here in chronological order) * Cargo * rustpkg * cargo-lite * Cargo (yes, there have been two different Cargos....)

barnacled 6y ago

I think you're strawmanning/misunderstanding me a bit to say 'just not going to take any contribution come their way'. I never suggested they ought to, the point is they seem NEVER to take any significant contribution from outside the Google team, like at all. >For people outside if their thinking aligned with core team they will feel welcome and others will feel unwelcome due to high handedness of core team. No, whether you align or not major contributions are not accepted. See the godep vs. go modules debacle for example. And again, that's all fine with me, and I can see why they'd operate that way, but they claim not to which is my major beef (and allow people to work very hard at contributing without realising it's not going to get them anywhere).

throwaway34241 6y ago
I think there’s been largish contributions to the compiler (webassembly backend etc) done by external people. For language changes, don’t they have a formal proposal process where someone submits a spec and the the team (and community) provides feedback before changes are accepted? If you accept that’s reasonable it explains some of how things have happened with dep and generics. If I remember right dep was becoming a de-facto standard without ever submitting to the proposal process where the Go team could address their technical differences. Obviously there was a messaging failure here and they could have emphasized that it was not formally accepted, but it’s tough to tell people not to use a major improvement to the status quo when there is no alternative to point to and hasn’t been for years. For language changes so far there’s been almost zero changes approved, by anyone, including the core team, so it’s hard to make a comparison. But if you look at the current generics proposal it’s an enormous amount of work to completely specify. As far as I know, there have been zero actual proposals by the community and several by the core team (most of which were rejected). I think the community sentiment has been more that we should have generics, or “wouldn’t this feature be useful” on the issue tracker without fully fleshing it out, not actually making formal proposals and getting shot down.
- barnacled 6y ago
  Nothing core though, and the godep thing is disputed by those involved - https://twitter.com/sdboyer/status/1034893100450291713 https://twitter.com/sdboyer/status/1034893100450291713 - more or less they got passed over after spending a bunch of time on it. It's complicated and there was miscommunication but it forms part of the pattern. I'm pretty sure there's been several different proposals for generics. And I seriously doubt anybody external to the go team submitting even an identical draft would be listened to. Lots of discussion documented at https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/ExperienceReports#generics https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/ExperienceReports#generics e.g. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vrAy9gMpMoS3uaVphB32uVXX4pi-HnNjkMEgyAHX4N4/edit# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vrAy9gMpMoS3uaVphB32uVXX... Even the tracker issue at https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292 states 'he intent is not to add generics to Go at this time, but rather to show people what a complete proposal would look like' - does that sound like they're open to an external person proposing it? I saw it even on a small scale back in 2011, back then I knew the generics thing would be solely implemented by the google guys. There is clearly a 'not invented here syndrome' going on which is entirely understandable actually for a programming language, I just wish there was more transparency on it. The second a core language change actually involves a person external to google or the team drop the concept that that could happen I'll withdraw my criticism.