5 ms·
It might be the least ambitious new language of the last ten years!
by jes5199 13y ago
It might be the least ambitious new language of the last ten years!
- Avshalom 13y agoI think that trophy is won pretty handily by Go.
- tomp 13y agoI wanted to say Go as well, but compared to any other possibly-mainstream languages, Go is very innovative - it has fibres/goroutines, channels, and structural typing/lack of class-based inheritance!
- effn 13y agoThe bar for what counts as "innovation" in mainstream languages is strikingly low.
- thescrewdriver 13y agoAll of which are available in other languages...
- Avshalom 13y agoIn addition to the fact that none of it's features are particularly novel lets remember that Go's founding ambition was "compile faster than C++"
- jfb 13y agoAnd people disparage them for it, which is nuts. Google had a problem that they determined could best be solved by creating Go. So they did it, and presumably, they've solved their problem. That seems like a perfectly good use of incremental improvement. Which raises an interesting point: what to people on the outside looks like a paradoxical combination of insane hubris and deep technical conservatism is probably simply what to Google's eyes looks like steady-state, responsible technical problem-solving -- c.f., hhvm and Facebook for a similar approach.
- lanna 13y ago> Go's founding ambition was "compile faster than C++" And Kotlin's is "compile faster than Scala"!
- rst 13y agoActually, Go's fairly successful melding of static typing and duck-typed interfaces was a useful new trick. (Which doesn't completely excuse the "C++ tried that and it didn't work for them so WE WON'T" foot-dragging on other matters...)
- voidlogic 13y ago>Go's fairly successful melding of static typing and duck-typed interfaces was a useful new trick For those that don't know this feature is called structural typing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_type_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_type_system Also, OCaml uses structural typing too.
- pjmlp 13y agoNo it was not, there are lots of languages that offer similar capabilities. The fact that mainstream developers don't know it, does not make it something that Go designers invented.
- eropple 13y agoOCaml already had structural typing. Scala does too.
- bguthrie 13y agoActually I think Hack might've just surpassed it.
- tomp 13y agoYou mean, except Dart.
- frowaway001 13y agoLet's just agree that Google couldn't design a language even if its life depended on it.
- bryanlarsen 13y agoHow about "Google has a surprisingly conservative culture".
- frowaway001 13y agoI wouldn't call "ignoring stuff from 1970" conservative.
- thescrewdriver 13y agoThey're using Java very widely, you don't get much more conservative than that.