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What was part of Go's pitch, exactly? And where did you see it pitched? People outside the Go team have tried to pitch Go as a lot of things, most of them havi

What was part of Go's pitch, exactly? And where did you see it pitched? People outside the Go team have tried to pitch Go as a lot of things, most of them having no relationship to what Go was actually intended to accomplish. The FAQ[1] may be enlightening. Nowhere does it say Go is supposed to be a straightjacket that makes bad programmers into good ones. [1] http://golang.org/doc/faq#What_is_the_purpose_of_the_project http://golang.org/doc/faq#What_is_the_purpose_of_the_project

GhotiFish 13y ago
You'll have to forgive me, I'm at work right now so I can't pull up the talk Rob Pike did on Go, I think it was 2011. Around the point where he explained Go was not a language to expand the boundaries of computer science. It's for programmers who "often are not as smart as they think they are" I'll look it up when I get the chance. That might be later tonight.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  I'm reasonably confident you're assigning too much significance to what was probably an offhand remark in a particular context. I just looked at slides from a 2010 talk[1] by Pike which was pretty explicit about what they were doing in this area: "It's a form of duck typing, but (usually) checkable at compile time. It's also another form of orthogonality." And this one from Russ Cox in 2010[2]: "Compiled, statically-typed languages (C, C++, Java) require too much typing and too much typing: * verbose, lots of repetition * too much focus on type hierarchy * types get in the way as much as they help * compiles take far too long" A common theme for Go from the beginning has been the balance between type safety and not getting in the way of the programmer. The analogy to duck typing has been a consistent observation throughout Go's public existence. This is incompatible with the sentiment you took from whatever talk you saw. Go's architects didn't set out to make a Java clone. It's more like Java's evil twin. [1] http://talks.golang.org/2010/ExpressivenessOfGo-2010.pdf http://talks.golang.org/2010/ExpressivenessOfGo-2010.pdf [2] http://talks.golang.org/2010/go_talk-20100112.html http://talks.golang.org/2010/go_talk-20100112.html

GhotiFish 13y ago

You'll have to forgive me, I'm at work right now so I can't pull up the talk Rob Pike did on Go, I think it was 2011. Around the point where he explained Go was not a language to expand the boundaries of computer science. It's for programmers who "often are not as smart as they think they are" I'll look it up when I get the chance. That might be later tonight.

nknighthb 13y ago
I'm reasonably confident you're assigning too much significance to what was probably an offhand remark in a particular context. I just looked at slides from a 2010 talk[1] by Pike which was pretty explicit about what they were doing in this area: "It's a form of duck typing, but (usually) checkable at compile time. It's also another form of orthogonality." And this one from Russ Cox in 2010[2]: "Compiled, statically-typed languages (C, C++, Java) require too much typing and too much typing: * verbose, lots of repetition * too much focus on type hierarchy * types get in the way as much as they help * compiles take far too long" A common theme for Go from the beginning has been the balance between type safety and not getting in the way of the programmer. The analogy to duck typing has been a consistent observation throughout Go's public existence. This is incompatible with the sentiment you took from whatever talk you saw. Go's architects didn't set out to make a Java clone. It's more like Java's evil twin. [1] http://talks.golang.org/2010/ExpressivenessOfGo-2010.pdf http://talks.golang.org/2010/ExpressivenessOfGo-2010.pdf [2] http://talks.golang.org/2010/go_talk-20100112.html http://talks.golang.org/2010/go_talk-20100112.html