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Those statements are entirely subjective and, frankly, come off as filled with more than a little hubris, not to mention an air of pettiness and childish langua

Those statements are entirely subjective and, frankly, come off as filled with more than a little hubris, not to mention an air of pettiness and childish language-flamewar-bait. Correct large-scale programs are very difficult to build and debug, full-stop. It isn't a "feature" unique to C, or any other language. Likewise for correct code, and incorrect code: they're both actually trivial to do in any language in the small scale, and see above for the large scale. That said, I view the effort to make a Go compiler using Go is something akin to "eating your own dogfood."

enneff 13y ago
Consider the audience: this document was written for the contributors to the Go project. It wasn't intended to be on the front page of Hacker News. It's not trying to convince anyone that Go is good and C is bad. It's just explaining the rationale for the move to Go. For the intended audience, these statements are pretty much self-evident, or we wouldn't be working on Go in the first place. Also I think you severely underestimate the benefits of memory safety.
dpark 13y ago
C is around 40 years old. Go is about 4 years old. If Go isn't easier to write correctly, easier to debug, and more fun to write, then it's got to be the most tragic and wasted programming language effort ever.
SwellJoe 13y ago
So...it's worth keeping in mind that some of the creators of go are some of the same people who helped create C and UNIX (Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, specifically are two of the three founders of go). They have earned the right to "hubris". And, if they believe they've made a better, easier to debug, more fun language than C (and they do believe that, as it's clear based on their own discussions of the language), I don't think I'd feel any right to argue with them.
girvo 13y ago
Uh... It's Rob Pike and Ken Thompson...
- enneff 13y ago
  Russ Cox wrote the document, and he's written more than his fair share of C code.

enneff 13y ago

Consider the audience: this document was written for the contributors to the Go project. It wasn't intended to be on the front page of Hacker News. It's not trying to convince anyone that Go is good and C is bad. It's just explaining the rationale for the move to Go. For the intended audience, these statements are pretty much self-evident, or we wouldn't be working on Go in the first place. Also I think you severely underestimate the benefits of memory safety.

dpark 13y ago

C is around 40 years old. Go is about 4 years old. If Go isn't easier to write correctly, easier to debug, and more fun to write, then it's got to be the most tragic and wasted programming language effort ever.

SwellJoe 13y ago

So...it's worth keeping in mind that some of the creators of go are some of the same people who helped create C and UNIX (Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, specifically are two of the three founders of go). They have earned the right to "hubris". And, if they believe they've made a better, easier to debug, more fun language than C (and they do believe that, as it's clear based on their own discussions of the language), I don't think I'd feel any right to argue with them.

girvo 13y ago

Uh... It's Rob Pike and Ken Thompson...

enneff 13y ago
Russ Cox wrote the document, and he's written more than his fair share of C code.