Hacker News Reader

Comment by rf15 | Hacker News Reader

while I think that that would be a good thing (I like what happened with C#), I see the languages specified and controlled by Microsoft, Google and Apple as second-class languages, since they are often lacking in community input and are usually designed with certain platform-specific goals in mind instead of being cross-platform. (or company-strategic goals when it comes to Google)

View on HN

I can understand conservative choices when it comes to picking a language but what you describe is a potential risk for plenty other existing languages as well as any new language too. Rust wouldn't be where it is today if it wasn't sponsored by Mozilla. Java was Sun Microsystems baby and I remember all the concerns at the time with the Sun vs Microsoft fighting over control of the ecosystem. Plus even many of the non-corporate languages are still heavily dependant on a small subset of maintainers.

At the end of the day if a language proves popular enough in other domains outside of the area which is directly controlled by the language maintainers, then the community will usually find a way of taking over maintenance of it.

We've seen this with Pascal, various BASIC dialects (including Visual Basic), and to an extent Java too. The problem with Objective-C was that - as far as I'm aware at least - it wasn't widely used outside of Apple / NeXT's ecosystem so if Apple deprecate support for Objective-C on their own platforms then there's little incentive for the community to keep using language (much like the problems with Visual Basic - which is why few know about it's open source forks). But languages like C# and Go are used massively across a multitude of domains so even if MS/Google were to kill them tomorrow, the community would almost certainly find a way to keep language alive. Heck, Go might even become more popular if that happened since many of the complaints against it are down to the highly opinionated approach of the current leadership.

Let's also not forget that Go and C# tooling are open source so the community wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel like they did with Delphi / Object Pascal and Visual Basic.

Yes, there's something not quite right with these company languages.

Whoever is smart will take note of what happened to VisualBasic and is happening to Objective-C.

You mean like C and C++ being developed at AT&T, nowadays designed at ANSI, with people on ARM, Google, Apple, Blommberg, Sony, IBM, Microsoft's payroll?

Actually, C was a lot worse. For the first 9 years C was basically whatever AT&T wanted. In 78 K&R published The C Programming Language, creating a specification. In the next decade C was very much tied to Unix and non-Unix usages often had some oddities and interoperability issues. The last 3 decades have been good though.

You know... there's a difference between "(...) with people on ARM, Google, Apple, Blommberg, Sony, IBM, Microsoft's payroll?" and "people on Google payroll". In one case you have many companies cooperating, in the other - just one company.

Looking into the past can have some predictive value, but looking that far back and at a different company is of very limited value.

If one evaluates C# they should obviously look at what MS are doing. Same thing for Swift and Apple.

I think what <pjmlp> is saying is that (1) these languages are too widely adopted to fail -- somebody is bound to take the ball and continue dribbling it even if the worst happens (company abandons language) and (2) to have a widely adopted language means you have to be a member of a number of committees -- because without standards you wouldn't become a widely adopted language in the first place.

In short, we're quite safe in terms of if C#, Swift and Go will live on. They will.

The issue with C# and Swift is that the Apple and MS dev communities enjoy having a ready made solution that they can pick up and work with immediately. Official support is very important.

C# and to some extent Swift are also two huge platforms, there are very few organisations out there that would be able to steer their development.

Finally, they are not standardised in any way. MS tried something with 2.0 and then gave up.

My impression is that these two live and die by the will of their corporate masters. I'm not saying they will kill them or anything, that would be pretty stupid of them to do.

> Finally, they are not standardised in any way. MS tried something with 2.0 and then gave up.

They are standardized, you just need to look at the right place.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/referen...

http://fsharp.org/specs/language-spec/

https://swift.org/documentation/

Documentation & specs is not standardisation, not in the C or C++ sense. But you already know that, so why are we having this conversation?

I assume you know what a de facto standard is all about.

If Google, Apple or Microsoft take their employees out of ANSI or from GCC/LLVM contributions, I can assure you they won't move much beyond the current state.

What are the odds that all big players would remove support for something that their platforms are built on? At the same time?

C++ is one of the healthiest languages in existance. It hits all the important checkboxes of standardisation, wide industry and platform support and large community.

I imagine you never lived through the days when each C++ compiler had a different understanding what it meant to compile C++ code.

It is just like trying to compile the Linux kernel with clang instead of gcc, with the source code full of gcc extensions.

Would you please give an example on how are Google's company-strategic goals making Go platform-specific, or hampered in any way?

Please note that I am not demeaning your statement. It's a legitimate curiosity on my side.

One example that comes to mind is Go dependency management. For a long time (and still?) Go had no way to do versioned dependency. Obviously this is no problem for Google which reportedly build from HEAD, but this shows Google-bias in Go development.

It does not show a strategic agenda that influences the language's governance, it only shows that Google was blind in that area.

So I guess you also see C and C++ as second-class languages, given the employers of the people meeting at ANSI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com