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Comment by floren | Hacker News Reader

> Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter.

Yeah, Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan definitely lacked experience in C and systems programming.

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AFAIK Brian Kernighan was never involved with the development of Go. He just likes to try new things and wrote a book about it.

Rob Pike is probably most famous for his involvement in Plan9 (prior to this). I honestly don't know what this experience entailed.

If you didn't know you should have clarified before making such sweeping statements. Who knew writing an OS would count as systems programming experience.

"writing an OS" is a sweeping, unsupported and inaccurate statement. You can be involved in Linux and, say, write the ext4 filesystem or Wifi drivers. Those are pretty low-level. You could also write shell utilities like ls in probably anything where you're just using OS APIs. Is that low-level? I would say not.

My friend, my comrade in arms, I have a link[1] for you. If you read only one of these papers, then please just read the first one, but please note the author credits on almost all of them.

[1] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/

EDIT: In the past half hour, the original website went down, I don't think it is related to my link. Here is a different link with the same contents:

https://9p.io/sys/doc/

The C, Unix and AWK creators know nothing on low-level stuff.

Please, kid.

Oh my god. Can you at least do your research now ? They wrote the core bits and not just userspace utils. Did you read what they wrote before blustering here ?

Mostly systems programming. In particular, he wrote its graphics system, then rewrote it, then rewrote it again. He led Plan 9 for many years. So, he has plenty of experience in systems programming.

What he seems to lack IMHO is sufficient curiosity about computing innovations not produced by him or the prestigious institutions he has worked for (Bell Labs, Google).

There's multiple levels of experience. Someone can get really good at the technical solutions without learning what the human problems are and how to solve them.

For example, someone might dismiss IDEs as being unnecessary because technically the same job can be done without them by a superior human being, so the solution is to just be a superior human being.

Or as another example, someone could completely dismiss syntax highlighting as being useless for the superior, implying that the solution to the problem syntax highlighting solves is to just also become a superior human being.

There are multiple layers to any solution, and if one of them is missing, the others are kind of shaken out of balance.

Kernighan helped write Unix and Plan 9, literally wrote the book on C, and is the "K" in awk, among other achievements.

Rob Pike worked on Unix, helped design and implement Plan 9 and Inferno, and co-designed UTF-8.

Apart from UTF-8, the piece of software he designed I used most was the sam text editor. An opinionated and rather quirky design, with some internals that made quite enthralling reading for me at the time: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/sam/

It's an interesting editor, especially the split between the editor itself and the graphical frontend. That split has helped me work on some very limited systems, thanks to `sam -r`.

Personally, I prefer acme; it's my daily driver editor.

If having worked in UNIX, Plan 9 and Inferno (and saying "having worked" is quite an understatement), having designed and implemented several programming languages (Alef, Squeak, Limbo, Sawzall, Go, ...), and having been an important part of Bell Labs and Google during their respective peaks is considered lack of experience in systems programming, what on earth would you consider as enough experience?

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> This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area

You don't write an UNIX derivative with a lack of system programming experience.

> AFAIK Brian Kernighan was never involved with the development of Go.

I think he meant Ken Thompson.

Rob Pike is also the co-author of UTF-8.

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