Hacker News Reader

> Unless you think Rob Pike is saying that Google is hiring mediocre programmers (hint: he's not),

Actually that's exactly what he's saying - although "inexperienced" is probably a better word than mediocre.

Golang is the modern blub language. It's really great for large companies and big code bases used by many people who want to get quickly up to speed. A decent, even new, programmer can get up to speed and be very productive in Golang in a matter of weeks. I can go and read the Kubernetes code base, which is huge, and know exactly what's going on pretty quickly, despite the complexities in that codebase like code generation and massive concurrency.

A language like Rust on the other hand would take months before someone can be seriously productive in it. That has a very real cost. It's sacrificing short term productivity for the long term benefits.

I think for a big company like Google, with so much staff, many inexperienced, and relatively high turnover (lots of people leaving and going constantly), a language like Golang is perfect.

At a small hedge fund, where you have maybe a dozen or two lifers, investing in a more strategic language like Haskell, Rust, OCaml, etc. starts to become viable.

Bah, a language being 'easy to get up to speed with' and 'a perfect fit for large teams working on huge code bases' should be a clue to stay the hell away from it.

Because if Golang maintains its current momentum, someday soon the developing world will start pumping out legions of mediocre Golang coders, just as they did with Java.

OK. I should have said, it's not inherently a criticism, it's just a fact. That others may choose to use it as a criticism--well, that's upto them.

Personally I don't think there's such a thing as a 'mediocre' programmer, I think there are programmers who have studied and trained in concepts, techniques and idioms and those who haven't.

It seems pretty clear from that quote that Google is hiring kids fresh out of college, and instead of training and educating them they're throwing them at an intentionally simplified language to get them to churn out code quickly.

Also I find it hard to believe that type-safety guarantees don't lead to good software engineering in industry, when the biggest industrial users of Python, PHP, JavaScript and Clojure--the dynamic language titans of the tech industry--have all recently developed and popularised type systems for them.

And in fact, I also don't see how you can derive a criticism of academia out of those quotes when they mention 'researchers' only in passing, as a point of comparison to talk about their coders' skill level. Too much mental gymnastics for me.

> I think there are programmers who have studied and trained in concepts, techniques and idioms and those who haven't

Which is really just talking in circles, because as I've now said in three consecutive comments, I have quite extensive experience with functional programming, and so I'm rejecting the argument that Go is simply for people who don't have that experience.

> And in fact, I also don't see how you can derive a criticism of academia out of those quotes when they mention 'researchers' only in passing, as a point of comparison to talk about their coders' skill level.

It's probably because, in five years of writing the language, I've had the opportunity to hear Pike (and others) talk about the topic. So when I'm responding, I'm drawing on that body of knowledge to inform what I'm saying, rather than limiting myself to a single quotation cited on a blog post written by someone who (by his own admission) is very new to the language.

> ... I'm rejecting the argument that Go is simply for people who don't have that experience.

You may reject it, but the fact remains that that was explicitly one of their design goals when creating Go.

> ... a single quotation cited on a blog post written by someone who (by his own admission) is very new to the language.

A quotation is a quotation; either Rob Pike said those words or he didn't. Who cited the quotation doesn't make a difference.

> Unless you think Rob Pike is saying that Google is hiring mediocre programmers (hint: he's not), that statement is intended as a criticism of academics ("researchers"). He's saying that the same things that excite researchers about programming languages don't lend themselves to good software engineering in industry. (And he's right).

If that was the case, it was a very dubious thought. Before Go was launched, the languages used in Google were Java, Python and C++. None of them look academic, none of them seem to require another language that is specifically designed to "unexcite" newcomers. Neither is functional, really.