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>> Made by really famous veteran language designers Yeah that’s a positive >> Backed by Google But that’s a negative, https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://kil

>> Made by really famous veteran language designers Yeah that’s a positive >> Backed by Google But that’s a negative, https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ I definitely think you’re too fast to dismiss the language features contributing to popularity. As an example: Fast builds are a positive developers immediately warm to when they experience them (stand by for rustacean “i need time to make tea and my compile times are exactly the right length for tea break” type comment). The example of the 4.4mb c++ project that results in the compiler ingesting 8Gb of data is eye opening. C++ needs to resolve type information for all includes and all their includes and all their includes… go only needs the interface so compilation can be done without all that effort.

ampersandy 4y ago
I really dislike this meme of pointing out that Google has deprecated a lot of projects. Do people actually expect Google to staff people & resources running every project they've released forever? A more interesting comparison would be open source projects that Google has abandoned or failed to properly hand over control of to the community, especially if we're talking about Go.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  I agree. It is true that Google has some poor product management and has some hilariously inept examples or product coherency (chat being the biggest disaster). But people praise startups for pivoting (read: killing a product) and (in general) demand innovation over glacial iteration. Trying new stuff necessarily means killing things that don't work (or paying a whole bunch of engineers to maintain a dead product for eternity).
  - cy_hauser 4y ago
    >> But people praise startups for pivoting ... Yes, but you discount the size of Google. Some of the things Google has killed have been large enough to have been considered successful products for a startup. They kill a "tiny" product because it's only large enough to be what some startup hopes to become. Google Reader is my favorite example of this. Multiple companies now exist in the soil on top of that grave.
- CraigJPerry 4y ago
  It’s not clear to me that Go would survive Google giving up its continued investment. Go has the fundamentals to survive - it’s open source, it has a healthy amount of contribution from non-google employees, the compiler is written in Go (that’s important when you consider an alternative situation like a python or js developer who wants to contribute a change to their compiler (they need to learn c / c++ respectively), i strongly suspect that if google walked away tomorrow, the velocity of change to the compiler, stdlib etc would not massively drop in the short term. Medium / long term though… would i bet on Go over Java? It’s not clear to me that Go has reached the level of market penetration to make that a simple question. Edit: i meant to add halo projects like docker, kube etc. as reasons to suggest the Go community is healthy
  - morelisp 4y ago
    I think we have some models of what would happen to Go without Google, it's probably similar to what happened to Java under the weaker period of Oracle's stewardship. The tool as-it-is keeps chugging along pretty well and even improving in small ways, but it stops reacting to larger trends and misses the boat at critical moments. Some new language in the same space comes up and finds it easy to shear off a massive portion of its user base by doing "the same thing, but modern". (Less obvious models would be PHP to backend JS, and PHP and Python to Go, which had similar community development arcs.)
timbit42 4y ago
>> Made by really famous veteran language designers > Yeah that’s a positive No, that's also a negative. C is close to assembly and produces fast code but it's weakly typed and very unsafe. Pascal was the strongly typed and safe option but people went for C because speed was considered more important than safety back when processors were slow. In today's online world, we've realized safety is more important than speed. We write web apps in slower interpreted languages and Rust is a response to unsafe code that can be hacked like a hot knife through butter. I consider it a move in the right direction. So I don't consider Go being made by really famous veteran language designers to be a plus because they produced a poor language that only won out because it neglected safety in a quest for speed. That wasn't as bad when computers weren't online, but it still allowed programmers to make errors that caused code to crash. Today it's become a critical issue. Interestingly, Go is more like Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon than like C, except in syntax. With Go, the creators of C have admitted Niklaus Wirth was right.
- CraigJPerry 4y ago
  >> but it's weakly typed and very unsafe Oh here we go :-) and yet the world spins on C kernels and lands jumbo jets in C autopilots and regulates heartbeats with C pacemakers and, and, and … It seems there’s more nuance to this than just “strong types good”. >> people went for C because speed was considered more important than safety But for the past 10-27 years people have the choice to use a fast and safe language (java, c#, go) and they do, in very large numbers. For the past 10 years (-ish) they’ve had the choice to use rust too - but they don’t. Rust has a popularity comparable to clojure or erlang.
  - anthk 4y ago
    > fast and safe language (java, C#...) No, no even close. Java and C# crawled on a Pentium III-IV even with SSE2 compared to C and C++. If you said Ocaml...
    - CraigJPerry 4y ago
      I started using java at 1.4, i remember Sun shouting to anyone who would listen that HotSpot could beat the gcc of the time on some 32bit integer benchmarks. IIRC it wasn't a million miles off the pace for floating point operations either.

ampersandy 4y ago

I really dislike this meme of pointing out that Google has deprecated a lot of projects. Do people actually expect Google to staff people & resources running every project they've released forever? A more interesting comparison would be open source projects that Google has abandoned or failed to properly hand over control of to the community, especially if we're talking about Go.

UncleMeat 4y ago
I agree. It is true that Google has some poor product management and has some hilariously inept examples or product coherency (chat being the biggest disaster). But people praise startups for pivoting (read: killing a product) and (in general) demand innovation over glacial iteration. Trying new stuff necessarily means killing things that don't work (or paying a whole bunch of engineers to maintain a dead product for eternity).
- cy_hauser 4y ago
  >> But people praise startups for pivoting ... Yes, but you discount the size of Google. Some of the things Google has killed have been large enough to have been considered successful products for a startup. They kill a "tiny" product because it's only large enough to be what some startup hopes to become. Google Reader is my favorite example of this. Multiple companies now exist in the soil on top of that grave.
CraigJPerry 4y ago
It’s not clear to me that Go would survive Google giving up its continued investment. Go has the fundamentals to survive - it’s open source, it has a healthy amount of contribution from non-google employees, the compiler is written in Go (that’s important when you consider an alternative situation like a python or js developer who wants to contribute a change to their compiler (they need to learn c / c++ respectively), i strongly suspect that if google walked away tomorrow, the velocity of change to the compiler, stdlib etc would not massively drop in the short term. Medium / long term though… would i bet on Go over Java? It’s not clear to me that Go has reached the level of market penetration to make that a simple question. Edit: i meant to add halo projects like docker, kube etc. as reasons to suggest the Go community is healthy
- morelisp 4y ago
  I think we have some models of what would happen to Go without Google, it's probably similar to what happened to Java under the weaker period of Oracle's stewardship. The tool as-it-is keeps chugging along pretty well and even improving in small ways, but it stops reacting to larger trends and misses the boat at critical moments. Some new language in the same space comes up and finds it easy to shear off a massive portion of its user base by doing "the same thing, but modern". (Less obvious models would be PHP to backend JS, and PHP and Python to Go, which had similar community development arcs.)

timbit42 4y ago

>> Made by really famous veteran language designers > Yeah that’s a positive No, that's also a negative. C is close to assembly and produces fast code but it's weakly typed and very unsafe. Pascal was the strongly typed and safe option but people went for C because speed was considered more important than safety back when processors were slow. In today's online world, we've realized safety is more important than speed. We write web apps in slower interpreted languages and Rust is a response to unsafe code that can be hacked like a hot knife through butter. I consider it a move in the right direction. So I don't consider Go being made by really famous veteran language designers to be a plus because they produced a poor language that only won out because it neglected safety in a quest for speed. That wasn't as bad when computers weren't online, but it still allowed programmers to make errors that caused code to crash. Today it's become a critical issue. Interestingly, Go is more like Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon than like C, except in syntax. With Go, the creators of C have admitted Niklaus Wirth was right.

CraigJPerry 4y ago
>> but it's weakly typed and very unsafe Oh here we go :-) and yet the world spins on C kernels and lands jumbo jets in C autopilots and regulates heartbeats with C pacemakers and, and, and … It seems there’s more nuance to this than just “strong types good”. >> people went for C because speed was considered more important than safety But for the past 10-27 years people have the choice to use a fast and safe language (java, c#, go) and they do, in very large numbers. For the past 10 years (-ish) they’ve had the choice to use rust too - but they don’t. Rust has a popularity comparable to clojure or erlang.
- anthk 4y ago
  > fast and safe language (java, C#...) No, no even close. Java and C# crawled on a Pentium III-IV even with SSE2 compared to C and C++. If you said Ocaml...
  - CraigJPerry 4y ago
    I started using java at 1.4, i remember Sun shouting to anyone who would listen that HotSpot could beat the gcc of the time on some 32bit integer benchmarks. IIRC it wasn't a million miles off the pace for floating point operations either.