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We built the Opera Mini server infrastructure based on Pike, starting back in 2004-2005 with a team that initially mostly came from the Roxen/Spinner days (a s
by tpmx 4y ago
We built the Opera Mini server infrastructure based on Pike, starting back in 2004-2005 with a team that initially mostly came from the Roxen/Spinner days (a separate company). I started working there in 97, and I was kinda late to the party - it started out in 93/94.
I still miss working with this language. It just makes so much sense to me.
The way I think of it is as a quite a lot more performant version of Python with a C-like syntax and a much more consistently designed - while still very rich - standard library.
The downside is of course that compared to Python, Pike is now almost completely unknown. The ecosystem is tiny, etc. We really sucked at marketing the language in the early critical days and then after a while kind of gave up and focused on using it to build commercial systems instead.
- nerdponx 4y agoIs Go the spiritual successor to Pike?
- tpmx 4y agoI doubt that Pike was on the Go designers' radars - but to me personally, it certainly feels so. Go is now my favorite language. Who knows though, the Pike language's main creator has been at Google since well before Go got started.
- 2143 4y agoIn the excellent GOPL book [1], there's a part called "The Origins of Go" in the Preface that lists languages which had an influence on Go (there's an accompanying diagram). You can see this part of the book (including the aforementioned diagram) in the official sample at [2] (page xii). The languages are: ALGOL 60, Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, Object Oberon, Oberon-2, CSP, Squeak, Newsqueak, Alef, and C. [1] The Go Programming Language, by Alan A. A. Donovan and Brian W. Kernighan https://www.gopl.io/ https://www.gopl.io/ [2] https://www.gopl.io/ch1.pdf https://www.gopl.io/ch1.pdf
- Abishek_Muthian 4y agoThanks for the information, But is the book still relevant today? Since Go has relatively very fast iteration cycle it now has lot more tricks than it did in 2015; Some of them default to other programming languages like 'sort'.
- em-bee 4y agoyou are not the first to ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944519 :-)