4 ms·

This line just throws me off and don't wanna make me go at it. import "fmt" Why would anyone designing language in this decade would allow cryptic names like

by sytelus 15y ago

This line just throws me off and don't wanna make me go at it. import "fmt" Why would anyone designing language in this decade would allow cryptic names like this in their "Hello World" code? Besides I still can't see single compelling reason to throw away all my tools and libraries in exchange of this thing. Do people create language just for the hack of it?

mhd 15y ago
Looking at the sheer number of esoteric programming languages (befunge, chef, intercal…), or the huge amount of quasy-Rubys and -Pythons, I'd say yes, people do that. And this doesn't even include DSL's, whether they're integrated in a language or stand-alone… But I don't think Go qualifies as a sheer 'hack value' language. We're talking about something developed under the auspices of Google here. They're looking for a systems programming language, which really hasn't been the focus of recent years (compared to scripting or VM language implementations). The only real contender here are some functional languagues who've gotten fast enough and have some good compilers, but not everybody wants to go all the way in that direction. Considering that Google does a lot of Java, Python and C++, something more in that family seems wanted, and I think Go qualifies here. Considering that this is the latest language in the C/Unix family and the pedigree of its designers and implementers (Rob Pike, Russ Cox, Ken Thompson(!)), some idiosyncrasies are too be expected. Unix has always been rather fond of abbreviations (`man creat`), and `fmt` doesn't seem any weirder than `stdio.h` – or `printf`.
enneff 15y ago
Package fmt is used all the time. It makes sense that it should have a short name.
- wnight 15y ago
  That was a pretty lame justification in the 1960s. And now we've got macroing text editors and general purpose compression that can recover the space.

by sytelus 15y ago

mhd 15y ago

Looking at the sheer number of esoteric programming languages (befunge, chef, intercal…), or the huge amount of quasy-Rubys and -Pythons, I'd say yes, people do that. And this doesn't even include DSL's, whether they're integrated in a language or stand-alone… But I don't think Go qualifies as a sheer 'hack value' language. We're talking about something developed under the auspices of Google here. They're looking for a systems programming language, which really hasn't been the focus of recent years (compared to scripting or VM language implementations). The only real contender here are some functional languagues who've gotten fast enough and have some good compilers, but not everybody wants to go all the way in that direction. Considering that Google does a lot of Java, Python and C++, something more in that family seems wanted, and I think Go qualifies here. Considering that this is the latest language in the C/Unix family and the pedigree of its designers and implementers (Rob Pike, Russ Cox, Ken Thompson(!)), some idiosyncrasies are too be expected. Unix has always been rather fond of abbreviations (`man creat`), and `fmt` doesn't seem any weirder than `stdio.h` – or `printf`.

enneff 15y ago

Package fmt is used all the time. It makes sense that it should have a short name.

wnight 15y ago
That was a pretty lame justification in the 1960s. And now we've got macroing text editors and general purpose compression that can recover the space.