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Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change it easily. That is important for a progra
by ein0p 2y ago
Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change it easily. That is important for a programming language, and it doesn’t happen organically.
- dom96 2y agoZero drama is easy when you get paid (a lot) to work on something.
- muratsu 2y agoHuhhh? Have you ever worked at a large enough company where stakeholder interests are not aligned?
- IshKebab 2y agoThat's private drama. For all we know there has been loads, but it's private so you can't see it.
- ncruces 2y agoWhere would you expect to see this drama unfold if it were private? Nowhere? That'd be incredible opsec. Code review happens in public, not on GitHub but on Gerrit. The main issue tracker is public, on GitHub. Proposals are largely handled on the issue tracker. There are public mailing lists, etc. Surely, there are face to face private meetings. And there are likely also private issue trackers, mailing lists, and etc. And, yes, sometimes, a seemingly arbitrary decision pops up, that was clearly discussed elsewhere. But these comments seem to come from people who never even tried to contribute, or deal with the process. I've done docs fixes as a total newb, had to convince the Windows maintainer to let me fix a Windows issue (that a year later produced flaky tests, which I fixed), made and got a proposal accepted, have a project in the linkname hall-of-shame, which led to another successful proposal to open up APIs (which then failed tests on some platforms, which I fixed). All with little drama, pure engineering.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ein0p 2y agoThat’s unfair. There’s plenty of drama in projects with all sorts of funding situations. Look at eg Rust. Lots of drama and it’s anyone’s guess if the code you wrote a year ago would work today.
- lkirkwood 2y ago> It's anyone's guess if the code you wrote a year ago would work today Is that true? In what sense? I was under the impression the editions took care of that.
- seeekr 2y agoNot true, not sure why GP said that. Been writing Rust for many years and code does not just break on compiler upgrades. Super stable overall, including the wonderfully evolving ecosystem!
- sangnoir 2y agoAnd yet we've had lots of drama in Linux and Redhat mailing lists, involving people paid to work on the respective projects, and using their work email.
- goalonetwo 2y agoI would rather say that it is easy to have zero drama when most of the committers come from a single large companies.
- Maxatar 2y agoGetting paid has nothing to do with drama. Plenty of high paid people get involved in drama and infighting across all walks of life including tech.
- segfaltnh 2y agoPretty sure Musk gets a decent paycheck, and manages to be involved in plenty of drama.
- richardwhiuk 2y agoI suspect all the drama happens internally.
- zja 2y agoAre there any Go team members that don’t work for Google? It’s a lot easier to remain civil/avoid drama when people know each other personally, and work together at a big company with an HR department.
- markkrj 2y agoDoes ex-googler counts? Then Filippo Valsorda...
- tomcam 2y agoOne reason I consider it so good
- sidewndr46 2y agoAbsolutely inaccurate. Pointer de-reference operator had a breaking change after 1.x
- arp242 2y agoI don't recall this off-hand; which change was that?
- tweenagedream 2y agoI mean they did say almost no breaking changes, depending how much has changed in the language, a small handful of breaking changes in niche use cases may be considered almost none by some. I'm not sure I would say the comment is absolutely inaccurate.
- vdqtp3 2y agoThe cost being that they [generally speaking] ignore proposals, pull requests, and new features - even if they are valuable to their users and AREN'T breaking.
- segfaltnh 2y agoMostly this comes down to recognizing the value of simplicity. I like Rust and Go, but I am infinitely grateful that Go is as minimal as it is. I wouldn't have had as much success ramping my team on Rust.
- ahci8e 2y agoAlmost zero drama, yeah. I do remember the dep drama though...
- justinclift 2y agoAnd the telemetry drama.
- gunapologist99 2y agoExactly. And it's in writing! The backwards compatibility promise: https://go.dev/doc/go1compat https://go.dev/doc/go1compat
- Onavo 2y agoThey are the programming language equivalent of GitHub repos that maintain a low open issue count by closing most issues as "won't fix" or "won't build".
- lolinder 2y agoYes. And? Programming languages more than almost any other type of project end up swamped with thousands of competing requests to implement mutually incompatible features. Some languages do better than others at saying no, and those languages tend to be the ones that achieve widespread adoption.
- pansa2 2y ago> Some languages do better than others at saying no, and those languages tend to be the ones that achieve widespread adoption. Unfortunately that’s not at all true - Go is a real outlier here. If it were true, we’d all be writing C instead of C++, Lua instead of Python and ES5 instead of TypeScript.
- cookiengineer 2y agoThe choice is yours. Don't blame your choices on other people's opinion that you don't agree with. Everything in life is a tradeoff. If you don't agree with the available languages, make it better. That's the power of open source :)
- randomdata 2y ago> The choice is yours [pansa2]. Who gave him control over what sees widespread adoption?
- flohofwoe 2y agoFWIW I switched from C++ to C about 7 years ago and never looked back (can't quite escape C++ completely though because some important libraries are still written in C++ unfortunately). I vastly prefer TS to JS, Python and Lua though.
- truncate 2y agoCouldn't agree more. Always felt community had trust in the team. Its not the fanciest language, but whatever they push for usually works. In contrast, recently I've had to deal with Swift, and they are often pushing like 10 features, but each of them is full of holes and annoyances. Great respect for doing the boring of keeping it stupid and simple.
- moogly 2y ago> almost zero drama Hm. Wasn't (the lack of) generics pretty drama filled? Especially the way they fought against it for so long.
- quectophoton 2y agos/fought against it/rejected superficial proposals that were mostly about syntax bikeshedding and didn't include enough research on how the proposal would play along with the rest of the language and ecosystem/