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First of all, “A lot of other lazy programmers”. That’s cringe. I don’t care who you are, that’s not a way to talk. Secondly, I think we have all been there. W

First of all, “A lot of other lazy programmers”. That’s cringe. I don’t care who you are, that’s not a way to talk. Secondly, I think we have all been there. We introduce a bug in an interface/API but then the users of it start depending on this behaviour and before you know it it’s a feature and it’s impossible to fix without breaking the world.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
He's obviously a very smart guy and a pioneer and a much more accomplished person than me (or most of us), but Rob Pike seems to make a habit of arrogantly talking down about other people's intelligence or skill: Re: Go “The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.” -- Rob Pike I agree it's really a cringe way of approaching people. In this (dotfile) case there may have been some self-deprecation in the comment though, so it's frankly hard to get too miffed about it.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  I think he very accurately described the problem Go is trying to solve which is how do you make new grads productive? In my experience at AWS people that graduated didn't understand the languages we used. This leads to a bunch of problems, and makes it's easy to write very bad, unmaintainable code. Lots of needless class hierarchies in Java, or a misunderstanding of `this` in JavaScript. Go solves the problem perfectly.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Never had that experience at Google. New grads and interns always seemed sharp. Might just be the superior quality of education out of U of Waterloo, or the hiring bar at our site, or both. I enjoyed working with them. With new grads, I generally didn't have to teach coding knowledge. It was more about transmitting wisdom around best practices, estimation, architecture, etc. If anything, to me Go makes a lot of things harder that could be simpler. Lack of generics means boilerplate. Eschewing test frameworks means boilerplate. The structural typing stuff is exotic (but neat I guess) and not familiar to most new programmers. The actor / CSP type concurrency stuff is also exotic and not familiar to most new programmers. I don't see how it's a language for new programmers. It also seems very much like a rehash of the concepts they had in Limbo so I actually don't find it honest for him to be claiming it was designed for this purpose (to simplify programming). Instead it feels very much like they had a hammer in search of a nail, an itch they've been scratching since the Plan9 days. And that's fine. I just don't buy this pitch about its market niche and the stuff about the relative intelligence of programmers is gratuitous. I've seen some very smart new grads produce amazing Rust code for example.
    - shepherdjerred 4y ago
      Go has generics now, and they're great. Anyway, the idea isn't that everyone already knows Go because it uses familiar features for concurrency, typing, etc. The idea is that Go is such a simple language, that anyone with solid CS experience can pick it up in a short amount of time and start being productive with it.
pwinnski 4y ago
Calling someone out (Rob Pike or not) for "A lot of other lazy programmers" is cringe. It's clear and accurate communication, and shouldn't need to be workshopped to avoid offending people determined to be offended.
deleted 4y ago
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googlryas 4y ago
Good point. Rob Pike has nothing interesting to add here. Just an old white dude making us cringe. It's like come on grandpa, its the 2020s, we've all been there.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

He's obviously a very smart guy and a pioneer and a much more accomplished person than me (or most of us), but Rob Pike seems to make a habit of arrogantly talking down about other people's intelligence or skill: Re: Go “The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.” -- Rob Pike I agree it's really a cringe way of approaching people. In this (dotfile) case there may have been some self-deprecation in the comment though, so it's frankly hard to get too miffed about it.

shepherdjerred 4y ago
I think he very accurately described the problem Go is trying to solve which is how do you make new grads productive? In my experience at AWS people that graduated didn't understand the languages we used. This leads to a bunch of problems, and makes it's easy to write very bad, unmaintainable code. Lots of needless class hierarchies in Java, or a misunderstanding of `this` in JavaScript. Go solves the problem perfectly.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Never had that experience at Google. New grads and interns always seemed sharp. Might just be the superior quality of education out of U of Waterloo, or the hiring bar at our site, or both. I enjoyed working with them. With new grads, I generally didn't have to teach coding knowledge. It was more about transmitting wisdom around best practices, estimation, architecture, etc. If anything, to me Go makes a lot of things harder that could be simpler. Lack of generics means boilerplate. Eschewing test frameworks means boilerplate. The structural typing stuff is exotic (but neat I guess) and not familiar to most new programmers. The actor / CSP type concurrency stuff is also exotic and not familiar to most new programmers. I don't see how it's a language for new programmers. It also seems very much like a rehash of the concepts they had in Limbo so I actually don't find it honest for him to be claiming it was designed for this purpose (to simplify programming). Instead it feels very much like they had a hammer in search of a nail, an itch they've been scratching since the Plan9 days. And that's fine. I just don't buy this pitch about its market niche and the stuff about the relative intelligence of programmers is gratuitous. I've seen some very smart new grads produce amazing Rust code for example.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    Go has generics now, and they're great. Anyway, the idea isn't that everyone already knows Go because it uses familiar features for concurrency, typing, etc. The idea is that Go is such a simple language, that anyone with solid CS experience can pick it up in a short amount of time and start being productive with it.

pwinnski 4y ago

Calling someone out (Rob Pike or not) for "A lot of other lazy programmers" is cringe. It's clear and accurate communication, and shouldn't need to be workshopped to avoid offending people determined to be offended.

deleted 4y ago

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googlryas 4y ago

Good point. Rob Pike has nothing interesting to add here. Just an old white dude making us cringe. It's like come on grandpa, its the 2020s, we've all been there.