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You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. Some people see languages as a bag o

by kjksf 12y ago

You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. Some people see languages as a bag of features (immutability! generic programming! laziness! operator overloading! algebraic types! hindley-miller type inference! pattern matching! exceptions! manual memory management!). See http://yager.io/programming/go.html http://yager.io/programming/go.html for an example of that line of thinking. Those people won't get Go. Designing a language is not about cramming every feature you can think of. It's about making good trade offs. A trade off is: you get something but you also loose something. I use Go because it made the biggest number of good trade offs. Or to put it differently: I program in Go because when writing code, it irritates me less than other languages. If you want a longer explanation of that: http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentia...

wcummings 12y ago
I get the impression some of the folks in the Golang crowd are "Blub" programmers [1]. It's not so much a matter of simplicity and trade-offs as it is a matter of "I don't need things I don't know about", which isn't a good argument to use Golang. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- enneff 12y ago
  Most Go programmers I know, including the language designers themselves, have a lot of experience in more feature rich and expressive languages. What appeals is the simplicity of Go, which gives you a lot less of a language to think about, so you can just think about solving problems instead. “I like a lot of the design decisions they made in the [Go] language. Basically, I like all of them.” – Martin Odersky, creator of Scala. I don't think anyone would accuse Odersky of being a "blub programmer."
  - jeremyjh 12y ago
    Martin has something nice to say about everyone's project. I seriously doubt he likes that a new language was created in 2009 that allows null references. But we'll never hear about it if he doesn't. Still, that doesn't make him a Go programmer.
- tree_of_item 12y ago
  This is a great way to insult a bunch of people and start a fight. "Beating the averages" is not a very good essay, I don't think you need to drag it in here.
- timtadh 12y ago
  I feel like you haven't met a lot of Go programmers in that case. The programmers I have met who use Go or are interested in it are often genuinely good programmers. Of course there are "crowd" followers in any language as popular in Go but Go is not a "Blub" language nor does it attract Blub programmers. Do I as a Go programmer sometimes wish that Go had feature X. Of course I do! I want that feature when I want that feature. But, I find Go to occupy an extremely practical position in my personal programming language continuum do to its fairly unique mix of features. Note, it is not the features themselves that are unique many languages individually have them. Indeed, they often also include features I miss in Go. Rather, it is the particular mixture which is useful. EDIT: To respond directly to the Blub article. Features pg calls out for LISP: Garbage collection, introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be a good thing. Runtime typing, ditto, is growing in popularity. Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in the early 1970s, are now, just barely, on the radar screen. Macros, introduced by Lisp in the mid 1960s, are still terra incognita. Go score card: Garbage Collection [x] Runtime Typing [p]* Lexical Clusures [x] Macros [ ] * Go has some dynamic typing capabilities but nothing like Python or LISP. Many would consider that a "good thing". It partially depends on what you are doing. Go has a 3/4 on the score card of features. Macros are of course enormously useful but also very difficult to shoe horn into a c-family language properly since they need to be expanded at compile time (unless you just go ahead and embed you compiler backend into the runtime system of your language. That would be kinda of crazy/awesome but you could do it). Rust has of course proven the utility of such a choice. I can't speak for pg, but Go has many fantastic features and is not a Blub. The features which are missing are not, by and large, features of LISP. EDIT 2: To add some more fuel to this fire... pg concludes the article with: During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. Note, he explicitly says here: not all languages are the same. He would worry when a company wanted Python programmers. Why? Because to him Python mixture of features represented a nice chunk of what LISP is providing him. Let's do another score card: Python Score Card Garbage Collection [x] Runtime Typing [x] Lexical Clusures [x] Macros [ ]* * It is somewhat possible through black magic hackery to create an AST level macro in Python. It is messy. It is cool. It's kinda crunky. And I am not sure anyone has ever seriously used this ability. It certainly isn't main stream. Checkout https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy for inspiration. Norvig agrees with this assessment: http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html . Given that many people are ok with moving from Python to Go <https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/2aup1g/why_are_people_ditching_python_for_go/> https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/2aup1g/why_are_peop... it seems reasonable to conclude that Go is an exceptible replacement for Python. Something no one has concluded about Java (for instance). Therefore, I believe pg would have been equally worried or almost as concerned about Go programmers as Python programmers.
- djur 12y ago
  "Blub" as a concept isn't really useful anymore. I've seen people attacked as "blub programmers" for criticizing Go for its lack of features. At worst it's a personal attack ("you are a short-sighted programmer"), at best it's kind of supercilious ("language X is great, it's just over your head").
  - Dewie 12y ago
    I think "blub" is just another example of "you don't know what you don't know", which is always going to be relevant. And not everyone have tried, or intend on trying, obscure/sophisticated/mind-bending programming languages. And that's fine, since we all have different interests (as long as we don't try and pretend that we are very knowledgeable about something which we don't really have an interest in pursuing). But to call someone a "blub programmer" does come off as quite rude.
cbp 12y ago
Some people look at a new language and don't see anything that proves it was made after the 1970s.
- zzzcpan 12y ago
  And I hope it stays that way. We don't need more features, we need to address psychological issue of mistake-making.
  - wyager 12y ago
    > We don't need more features You may be a victim of the Blub paradox. There are many useful and powerful features missing from languages like Go, and many of them (like powerful type systems) exactly address human mistake-making.
    - f2f 12y ago
      well, rust has all those powerful features. it's been out in the open for exactly as long as Go has.
      - djur 12y ago
        Rust isn't nearly as stable as Go. It still hasn't reached the state that Go was in when it was released outside Google. That's not a judgment of Rust, just a result of it being developed in the open instead of inside a company, and it being much more ambitious than Go.
        davecheney 12y ago
        Go was released as an open source project on the 10th of November 2009. Which part of that is _not_ open to you in a way that Rust is ?
        dbaupp 12y ago
        Externally, it certainly seems that Go was open sourced in a far more finished state, with only relatively small tweaks after the initial release, while Rust was quite raw and has had most of its fundamental design work done in the open (with significant contribution from volunteers, both code and design) after being placed on github in 2010.
ansible 12y ago
Designing a language is not about cramming every feature you can think of. It's about making good trade offs. Indeed. And the hallmark of the really good design is to examine the interactions of those features and see how well they mesh together. And what they imply about how actual programs are designed and maintained.
- thirsteh 12y ago
  While I agree with these arguments, the purpose of Go is to Get Stuff Done (TM), and the main purpose of Haskell is to foster PL research and semi-formal methods. It's not really fair to say Haskell is unpopular because it crammed a bunch of things inthere: It is very popular in the niche it was designed for. Go just has a wider appeal. And remember not to equate popularity with quality. We're all using JavaScript because that's what you need to do in the browser, not because it's a particularly good language. (Not that Go doesn't deserve the adoption it's gotten. It's great to see people ditching clunky Python/Ruby/C++/JavaScript stuff for Go.)
wwweston 12y ago
> You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. This line of thinking serves more to call in to question the engineering and management cultures we have than it does to reflect poorly on Haskell and Erlang, and if it's true that Go's essential strength compared to them is that it is well-fitted to these cultures, that's not particularly flattering, however locally practical it may be.
- jshen 12y ago
  If languages like Haskell and Erlang gave a competitive advantage, wouldn't we see companies which used them succeeding over those that don't? Maybe Go is fitting into the cultures that succeed, and if that's the case, well it's the better choice, right?
  - lmm 12y ago
    > If languages like Haskell and Erlang gave a competitive advantage, wouldn't we see companies which used them succeeding over those that don't? We are. WhatsApp generated a flurry of interest around Erlang. Heroku uses it. I'm sure there are more examples. Google is at this point already a large corporation and probably already in decline (IMO). The tools they use are optimized for interchangeability of mediocre programmers, not for high productivity from a small team. Go is a perfectly good Java 1.4. (There's Docker using Go, but I think their whole approach is a bad idea).
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - jshen 12y ago
      You are seeing companies that use those languages suceeding at a higher rate than those that don't? I bet I can find 10 succeeding that use ruby or node for everyone that uses Erlang. We could also look at the open source world. For every riak there are 10 java sucesses of a similar kind. We'd need to do some real statistics but my bet is that we see no benefit from those languages in terms of success of the business.
coldtea 12y ago
>You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. Programmers liking confortable algol like syntax, and Google pushing it?
macu 12y ago
> I program in Go because when writing code, it irritates me less than other languages. This is how I feel too. There are countless styles of prose, but some styles are restricted deliberately for aesthetics or practical reasons. I prefer to write prose in plain terms, and Go enables me to write code the same way. Some languages more than others have parts that stick out in odd ways, and add unwelcome personality to my code. Yet sometimes I wish to put higher concepts into abstract terms, and Go is less expressive here. You can't always shape things the way you want, and you can't build reusable parts with the same flexibility as in other languages. But, when it comes to tinkering and giving form to ideas, I am more productive working with a basic set of LEGO than a box of all the specialized pieces someone may have thought I might ever find a use for.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. Because Google. In longer form, because Google is big and Go is well-enough-adapted for problems Google has (there may or may not be better solutions, and there may be some NIH factor going on in Google favoring it, but its at least good enough), and because the fact that Google is big and behind Go, that gets it lots of attention and interest and use even in places where it may not be as well suited as alternatives or what it is replacing.

by kjksf 12y ago

wcummings 12y ago

I get the impression some of the folks in the Golang crowd are "Blub" programmers [1]. It's not so much a matter of simplicity and trade-offs as it is a matter of "I don't need things I don't know about", which isn't a good argument to use Golang. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

enneff 12y ago
Most Go programmers I know, including the language designers themselves, have a lot of experience in more feature rich and expressive languages. What appeals is the simplicity of Go, which gives you a lot less of a language to think about, so you can just think about solving problems instead. “I like a lot of the design decisions they made in the [Go] language. Basically, I like all of them.” – Martin Odersky, creator of Scala. I don't think anyone would accuse Odersky of being a "blub programmer."
- jeremyjh 12y ago
  Martin has something nice to say about everyone's project. I seriously doubt he likes that a new language was created in 2009 that allows null references. But we'll never hear about it if he doesn't. Still, that doesn't make him a Go programmer.
tree_of_item 12y ago
This is a great way to insult a bunch of people and start a fight. "Beating the averages" is not a very good essay, I don't think you need to drag it in here.
timtadh 12y ago
I feel like you haven't met a lot of Go programmers in that case. The programmers I have met who use Go or are interested in it are often genuinely good programmers. Of course there are "crowd" followers in any language as popular in Go but Go is not a "Blub" language nor does it attract Blub programmers. Do I as a Go programmer sometimes wish that Go had feature X. Of course I do! I want that feature when I want that feature. But, I find Go to occupy an extremely practical position in my personal programming language continuum do to its fairly unique mix of features. Note, it is not the features themselves that are unique many languages individually have them. Indeed, they often also include features I miss in Go. Rather, it is the particular mixture which is useful. EDIT: To respond directly to the Blub article. Features pg calls out for LISP: Garbage collection, introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be a good thing. Runtime typing, ditto, is growing in popularity. Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in the early 1970s, are now, just barely, on the radar screen. Macros, introduced by Lisp in the mid 1960s, are still terra incognita. Go score card: Garbage Collection [x] Runtime Typing [p]* Lexical Clusures [x] Macros [ ] * Go has some dynamic typing capabilities but nothing like Python or LISP. Many would consider that a "good thing". It partially depends on what you are doing. Go has a 3/4 on the score card of features. Macros are of course enormously useful but also very difficult to shoe horn into a c-family language properly since they need to be expanded at compile time (unless you just go ahead and embed you compiler backend into the runtime system of your language. That would be kinda of crazy/awesome but you could do it). Rust has of course proven the utility of such a choice. I can't speak for pg, but Go has many fantastic features and is not a Blub. The features which are missing are not, by and large, features of LISP. EDIT 2: To add some more fuel to this fire... pg concludes the article with: During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. Note, he explicitly says here: not all languages are the same. He would worry when a company wanted Python programmers. Why? Because to him Python mixture of features represented a nice chunk of what LISP is providing him. Let's do another score card: Python Score Card Garbage Collection [x] Runtime Typing [x] Lexical Clusures [x] Macros [ ]* * It is somewhat possible through black magic hackery to create an AST level macro in Python. It is messy. It is cool. It's kinda crunky. And I am not sure anyone has ever seriously used this ability. It certainly isn't main stream. Checkout https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy for inspiration. Norvig agrees with this assessment: http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html . Given that many people are ok with moving from Python to Go <https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/2aup1g/why_are_people_ditching_python_for_go/> https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/2aup1g/why_are_peop... it seems reasonable to conclude that Go is an exceptible replacement for Python. Something no one has concluded about Java (for instance). Therefore, I believe pg would have been equally worried or almost as concerned about Go programmers as Python programmers.
djur 12y ago
"Blub" as a concept isn't really useful anymore. I've seen people attacked as "blub programmers" for criticizing Go for its lack of features. At worst it's a personal attack ("you are a short-sighted programmer"), at best it's kind of supercilious ("language X is great, it's just over your head").
- Dewie 12y ago
  I think "blub" is just another example of "you don't know what you don't know", which is always going to be relevant. And not everyone have tried, or intend on trying, obscure/sophisticated/mind-bending programming languages. And that's fine, since we all have different interests (as long as we don't try and pretend that we are very knowledgeable about something which we don't really have an interest in pursuing). But to call someone a "blub programmer" does come off as quite rude.

cbp 12y ago

Some people look at a new language and don't see anything that proves it was made after the 1970s.

zzzcpan 12y ago
And I hope it stays that way. We don't need more features, we need to address psychological issue of mistake-making.
- wyager 12y ago
  > We don't need more features You may be a victim of the Blub paradox. There are many useful and powerful features missing from languages like Go, and many of them (like powerful type systems) exactly address human mistake-making.
  - f2f 12y ago
    well, rust has all those powerful features. it's been out in the open for exactly as long as Go has.
    - djur 12y ago
      Rust isn't nearly as stable as Go. It still hasn't reached the state that Go was in when it was released outside Google. That's not a judgment of Rust, just a result of it being developed in the open instead of inside a company, and it being much more ambitious than Go.
      - davecheney 12y ago
        Go was released as an open source project on the 10th of November 2009. Which part of that is _not_ open to you in a way that Rust is ?
        dbaupp 12y ago
        Externally, it certainly seems that Go was open sourced in a far more finished state, with only relatively small tweaks after the initial release, while Rust was quite raw and has had most of its fundamental design work done in the open (with significant contribution from volunteers, both code and design) after being placed on github in 2010.

ansible 12y ago

Designing a language is not about cramming every feature you can think of. It's about making good trade offs. Indeed. And the hallmark of the really good design is to examine the interactions of those features and see how well they mesh together. And what they imply about how actual programs are designed and maintained.

thirsteh 12y ago
While I agree with these arguments, the purpose of Go is to Get Stuff Done (TM), and the main purpose of Haskell is to foster PL research and semi-formal methods. It's not really fair to say Haskell is unpopular because it crammed a bunch of things inthere: It is very popular in the niche it was designed for. Go just has a wider appeal. And remember not to equate popularity with quality. We're all using JavaScript because that's what you need to do in the browser, not because it's a particularly good language. (Not that Go doesn't deserve the adoption it's gotten. It's great to see people ditching clunky Python/Ruby/C++/JavaScript stuff for Go.)

wwweston 12y ago

> You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. This line of thinking serves more to call in to question the engineering and management cultures we have than it does to reflect poorly on Haskell and Erlang, and if it's true that Go's essential strength compared to them is that it is well-fitted to these cultures, that's not particularly flattering, however locally practical it may be.

jshen 12y ago
If languages like Haskell and Erlang gave a competitive advantage, wouldn't we see companies which used them succeeding over those that don't? Maybe Go is fitting into the cultures that succeed, and if that's the case, well it's the better choice, right?
- lmm 12y ago
  > If languages like Haskell and Erlang gave a competitive advantage, wouldn't we see companies which used them succeeding over those that don't? We are. WhatsApp generated a flurry of interest around Erlang. Heroku uses it. I'm sure there are more examples. Google is at this point already a large corporation and probably already in decline (IMO). The tools they use are optimized for interchangeability of mediocre programmers, not for high productivity from a small team. Go is a perfectly good Java 1.4. (There's Docker using Go, but I think their whole approach is a bad idea).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jshen 12y ago
    You are seeing companies that use those languages suceeding at a higher rate than those that don't? I bet I can find 10 succeeding that use ruby or node for everyone that uses Erlang. We could also look at the open source world. For every riak there are 10 java sucesses of a similar kind. We'd need to do some real statistics but my bet is that we see no benefit from those languages in terms of success of the business.

coldtea 12y ago

>You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. Programmers liking confortable algol like syntax, and Google pushing it?

macu 12y ago

> I program in Go because when writing code, it irritates me less than other languages. This is how I feel too. There are countless styles of prose, but some styles are restricted deliberately for aesthetics or practical reasons. I prefer to write prose in plain terms, and Go enables me to write code the same way. Some languages more than others have parts that stick out in odd ways, and add unwelcome personality to my code. Yet sometimes I wish to put higher concepts into abstract terms, and Go is less expressive here. You can't always shape things the way you want, and you can't build reusable parts with the same flexibility as in other languages. But, when it comes to tinkering and giving form to ideas, I am more productive working with a basic set of LEGO than a box of all the specialized pieces someone may have thought I might ever find a use for.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. Because Google. In longer form, because Google is big and Go is well-enough-adapted for problems Google has (there may or may not be better solutions, and there may be some NIH factor going on in Google favoring it, but its at least good enough), and because the fact that Google is big and behind Go, that gets it lots of attention and interest and use even in places where it may not be as well suited as alternatives or what it is replacing.