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Comment by flogic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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).

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