Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

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So, it's possible that the Go developers will get to ignore decades of progress, as they love to do, and still be competitive, because that progress was towards a different future to the one we arrived at.

Are other fields as bad as programming? Do engineering people get to do the equivalent of having a paper published or getting to present at a conference because they implemented something in language A which was already done three years ago in language B? Do other fields have people grousing about how no one uses X, even though it is clearly "better," where "better" is basically an unsubstantiated opinion?

Some embarrassingly large number of "best practices" in our field are pretty much based on a feeling it "seems right" combined with a "well, it worked a couple times before" level of empiricism. Vital decisions about tooling, such as choice of programming language, are made by some combination of: following the herd, following one's own prejudices, or being enamored of a nifty idea.

One thing a company at the scale of Google could probably afford to do, would be to collect real data about the effects of programming practices.

Go isn't a research project. It's more a manifesto on programming philosophy born of "old man rage" in language form. This works out mostly because the old men in question happen to include Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. However, that results in a very specific feel and set of tradeoffs in Go.

You might not agree with the design decisions, but to say one of the most successful contemporary systems programming languages was born out "old man rage" is insulting

to say one of the most successful contemporary systems programming languages was born out "old man rage" is insulting

Should I be insulted by your finding it insulting? My thought on reading that phrase was, "Right on!"

With all the discussions of ageism and sexism in tech, classifing a significant contribution to the industry as the result of "old man rage" is inappropriate IMHO

I can see how it would imply that negative connotation.

But being classifiable as an "old man" myself, I rather find it more annoying that it should be taken as a negative. Maybe "old man rage" should be taken as an indicator that the lessons of experience have been neglected? Instead, in our culture, it is taken to mean something foolish. I think this says something about our culture.

To be fair, I meant it in both contexts at the same time. A more polite term might be "opinionatedly retro". Go's conservative bend is both a positive and negative.

Somewhat like the reviews my lovers give me.

What about in your un-honest opinion?

I keep wondering how much success it would have had if the design team was still at AT&T.

Small nit but many of us wouldn't consider Go a systems programming language. I'd say "service programming langauge" is more appropriate. It's missing many things that would make it appropriate for interacting with hardware and limited resources.

I would rather people called it an application programming language. It relies heavily on it's runtime, and I've yet to see a piece of go code running on bare metal that isn't a hack or a proof of concept. However, I've seen multiple applications that rely on the OS to have nice abstractions over low-level inter-computer IPC (ethernet, tcp/ip).

Go isn't a research project.

Never said it was.

It's more a manifesto on programming philosophy born of "old man rage" in language form.

I suspect this has something to do with why I like it so much!

Are other fields as bad as programming?

K-12 education for sure. Completely fad (procurement) driven, utterly disconnected from reality (best available science) with egos and bent morality added for giggles.

Mind the feedback loops and incentives.

And don't trust the opinion of anyone who hasn't maintained code they (personally) wrote and deployed +5 years ago.

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