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The initial quote is a good summary about the thing I find must annoying about Go. They constantly imply that programming research is useless in the real world

by tikhonj 14y ago

The initial quote is a good summary about the thing I find must annoying about Go. They constantly imply that programming research is useless in the real world or at least impractical, and use that to ignore the last several decades of progress. Then they try to turn ignoring research into a virtue! It essentially presents a false dichotomy between programming research and programming practice. This is particularly unfortunate because the most practical and productive languages I know are the ones that embrace theory like OCaml and Haskell. After all, most programming research is all about being more productive in some way, and tends to approach the problem in a very organized and disciplined fashion, usually building on past results.

vanderZwan 14y ago
I'm not sure who "they" are, but certainly not the core development team, and Samuel Tesla does not represent them. See for example Rob Pike saying how mind blowing and inspiring Tony Hoare's CSP paper is, how everyone should read it and how it inspired Go[1]. Another example is how Go's regexp implementation has a solid mathematical foundation[2]. Now, those are two examples of quite old programming research being used to good effect in Go, so there is an opening for criticism there. But in general I'm pretty sure the core go devs don't have have anything against programming research nor try to create this false dichotomy. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo [2] http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
- binarycrusader 14y ago
  For those curious, Hoare's homepage and an electronic copy of the CSP Book can be found here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/thoare/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/thoare/ http://www.usingcsp.com/ http://www.usingcsp.com/
tesla 14y ago
It is rather surreal to see myself quoted. Especially something I wrote on my blog that I didn't think anybody actually reads. Allow me to provide some context [1] for the quote. Shortly after the language was released, somebody was ranting [2] about how Go was not innovative at all in comparison to other modern languages. I was not suggesting that programming research is useless and that we should ignore several decades of progress. I was, rather, saying that Go was applying those several decades of progress to systems programming to produce a more modern version of C. Here is the whole paragraph that quote was lifted from: "The point the author fails to see is that Go is not meant to innovate programming theory. It’s meant to innovate programming practice. This is an upgrade to C. It’s a language that applies the innovations of the last thirty years to the systems world, where the state of the art is still portable assembler. So no, the language isn’t introducing brilliant new ideas. It’s taking tested old ideas, and introducing them into a new arena." [1] http://blog.alieniloquent.com/2009/12/15/newsflash-go-is-experimental.html http://blog.alieniloquent.com/2009/12/15/newsflash-go-is-exp... [2] http://monoc.mo.funpic.de/go-rant/ http://monoc.mo.funpic.de/go-rant/

by tikhonj 14y ago

vanderZwan 14y ago

I'm not sure who "they" are, but certainly not the core development team, and Samuel Tesla does not represent them. See for example Rob Pike saying how mind blowing and inspiring Tony Hoare's CSP paper is, how everyone should read it and how it inspired Go[1]. Another example is how Go's regexp implementation has a solid mathematical foundation[2]. Now, those are two examples of quite old programming research being used to good effect in Go, so there is an opening for criticism there. But in general I'm pretty sure the core go devs don't have have anything against programming research nor try to create this false dichotomy. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo [2] http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

binarycrusader 14y ago
For those curious, Hoare's homepage and an electronic copy of the CSP Book can be found here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/thoare/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/thoare/ http://www.usingcsp.com/ http://www.usingcsp.com/

tesla 14y ago

It is rather surreal to see myself quoted. Especially something I wrote on my blog that I didn't think anybody actually reads. Allow me to provide some context [1] for the quote. Shortly after the language was released, somebody was ranting [2] about how Go was not innovative at all in comparison to other modern languages. I was not suggesting that programming research is useless and that we should ignore several decades of progress. I was, rather, saying that Go was applying those several decades of progress to systems programming to produce a more modern version of C. Here is the whole paragraph that quote was lifted from: "The point the author fails to see is that Go is not meant to innovate programming theory. It’s meant to innovate programming practice. This is an upgrade to C. It’s a language that applies the innovations of the last thirty years to the systems world, where the state of the art is still portable assembler. So no, the language isn’t introducing brilliant new ideas. It’s taking tested old ideas, and introducing them into a new arena." [1] http://blog.alieniloquent.com/2009/12/15/newsflash-go-is-experimental.html http://blog.alieniloquent.com/2009/12/15/newsflash-go-is-exp... [2] http://monoc.mo.funpic.de/go-rant/ http://monoc.mo.funpic.de/go-rant/