Why I like lots of languages, and Go is pretty neat too

http://blog.dhconnelly.com/2012/03/why-i-like-lots-of-languages-and-go-is.html

by manveru • 14 years ago

165 33 14 years ago

blog.dhconnelly.com

ahnunahki• 14 years ago

Wish all these posts would GO away.

gauravk92• 14 years ago

I think the language features are neat but who wants to be beholden to google and no one else. We're not even sure how much they use Go, just leave it to them I say.

enneff3• 14 years ago

Go is an entirely open source project with more than 200 contributors from outside Google. If you use Go you are not beholden to anyone. Go is free.

As for Go's use at Google, Go already powers some of our core infrastructure. For example, the YouTube team recently published one of their core services as an open source project: http://code.google.com/p/vitess/

Homunculiheaded• 14 years ago

You could have said the same thing about C and AT&T Bell Labs.

BarkMore• 14 years ago

In addition to being free as enneff points out, the implementation is small enough that a group of outsiders can reasonably pick up the language and carry it forward without the benefit of Google's institutional knowledge.

luriel• 14 years ago

And the language itself is simple and small enough that a full-re-implementation is quite feasible.

DHowett• 14 years ago

Welcome to today's installment of "Go Post!" This time, we will be visiting the rebuttal to both "Go is amazing!" and "Why I will never use Go." What insights will our daring author bring? Find out now!

firichapo• 14 years ago

I'll pass and just read the insightful comments from the HN community.

dhconnelly2• 14 years ago

If 2,000 words is too long, there's a TL;DR at the top of the post.

Jimmie• 14 years ago

Articles every day? It's almost like this is a news site and Go hitting release candidate 1 is news.

_delirium2• 14 years ago

It's fine we have articles, but I do think there's a tendency (here, as elsewhere) towards the less-subtle ones that take strong, easy to understand positions, of the "Go is great!" or "Go is crap!" variety.

I think I first noticed that tendency in general, though there are doubtless lots of earlier examples, when Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows were simultaneous best-sellers. On the question of how modern technology/networking impacts cognition, it seems the two positions that sell a lot are: "it's awesome for cognition!" and "it's horrible for cognition!"

rplnt• 14 years ago

This happens with every popular topic. Dozens of blog reactions appear. Comment here on HN would do, but I guess they are meant for a wider audience.

enneff3• 14 years ago

If you want to try Go, now is a great time. We just announced Go 1 release candidate 1, which you can try here: http://weekly.golang.org/

ghshephard• 14 years ago

Heads up - where is the best place to send feedback for little gotchas like this:

  mbar:src shephard$ sudo go get code.google.com/p/go-tour/gotour
  Password:
  # cd .; hg clone -U https://code.google.com/p/go-tour
    /usr/local/go/src/pkg/code.google.com/p/go-tour
  package code.google.com/p/go-tour/gotour: exec: "hg":
  executable file not found in $PATH

enneff3• 14 years ago

Either the issue tracker http://code.google.com/p/go/issues or the golang-nuts mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts

The particular problem you have is you need mercurial installed on your system to use "go get" with mercurial repositories.

irahul• 14 years ago

Why are you doing `sudo go get`? I installed go under my home directory, and `go get` works fine.

kiba• 14 years ago

Do languages eventually get better over time? If that's true, I would be expecting some fossil languages to become less attractive over time as living languages like python and ruby become "better" for your given needs.

markokocic2• 14 years ago

Since Lisp is one off the oldest and arguably (one of) the best, it's true that languages get better over time.

groovy2shoes2• 14 years ago

Current Lisps are so dissimilar to the first Lisps that they're hardly the same language anymore. Really, the Lisps form a family of languages. If you can argue that Clojure is just a "better" Lisp, you could just as easily argue that Go (or C#, or Java, or whathaveyou) is just a "better" Algol.

DanWaterworth• 14 years ago

Languages only get better if language designers learn from previous attempts.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Well the thing with languages are that they are always better, under some circumstances, than some other language (maelstrom and brainfuck excepted, they are no good under any circumstances) which are in turn better than others, under other circumstances. Nobody would choose ruby to write a kernel or do embedded programming. You can find better languages than C to write a web service in.

While languages don't get better over time they do change which means that there are more of them, which means it is more likely that you will find some that suit you.

nxn• 14 years ago

I don't think there's any general law for whether they do or don't.

On one hand, I can definitely look at C# right now and see how it is a vast improvement upon C# 1.0. I'll even go as far as to say I would probably refuse to write code in C# if it had not become what it is today.

On the other, I think you can only really change a language up to a certain degree before creating an inconsistent mess. If trends in the future dictate the need for a shift in paradigms, the extent to which existing languages can accommodate this shift is probably limited. I mean, you can often incorporate features that are based on the new approach to thinking about a problem, but once you start changing the core semantics of the language you're probably going to be better off with something completely new.

kristianp• 14 years ago

Of course this article is a reaction to all the polarized good vs bad discussion that is going on.

Perhaps people should just think of Go as one of those languages to learn in order to broaden their programming experience, not whether it's going to be the new rockstar programming trend. It's almost as if the HN community is trying to vote for the web stack that is sanctioned after rails then node.js!

Go's differences to other languages are enough for it to qualify as a language to learn as one of the many languages to try out.

dinkumthinkum• 14 years ago

Java, SOAP, and XML are still cool and new? OK, as much as I like to rail against the whole hipster crowd that has taken over programming ... That is a bridge too far even for me. Sorry.

Why I like lots of languages, and Go is pretty neat too

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