Comment by zerocount | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zerocount | Hacker News Reader

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You sound like you have a chip on your shoulder and you come off as a spoiled child. Just as the anti-Trump crowd doesn't like Trump's personality, you reject Pike for his arrogance.

He's done great things. Think about the caliber of people that man worked with every day. And then he goes to Google and sees thousands of 'ordinary' people slinging C++ and doing web work. We become products of our environment. There's a lot of gap between him and you. And that's ok. You'll go on to do another 10 years at another big tech company and live a good life.

I'm way below your caliber and I see some arrogance in your words. I think both of you are arrogant because you unconciously became a product of the environment. I'm just a nobody that fails 9/10 interviews, including Google 2 months ago. It takes luck for me to get hired anywhere and I find it hard to relate to the middle class people I work with because I've been so poor. But I bet you I come off as arrogant to tradesmen, cashiers, janitors, and many others. Just let it go.

> Think about the caliber of people that man worked with every day.

Greatness by association is not a solid concept. It shows how lucky a person is to be surrounded by great people but in itself does not count as an evidence of his greatness. But on the other hand, great research minds tend to cluster, thus his priors are above average.

> Just as the anti-Trump crowd doesn't like Trump's personality, you reject Pike for his arrogance.

This feels like an odd and unfair comparison.

I have nothing but respect for Pike and what he’s accomplished.

I don’t dislike him in some anti-cult-of-personality. I’m not ignoring good work he’s done just because it doesn’t fit my world view.

But I CAN criticize his individual work for being limiting or lacking ergonomics that I like.

And it’s entirely fair to look at Pike’s personal motivation for making the decisions he made, because it has an impact not only on what Go is currently, but also what it’s likely to be (or likely to not be) in the future.

If Go were created with the intention to be, say, a cleaner C++ with garbage collection, then I’d be all over it. I’d know that even if I don’t fully like it’s implementation today, it might eventually “get there”.

But instead it was created as an admittedly dumbed down language for people that Pike personally decided needed a dumbed down language, so I know that it’s never going to be what I want it to be.

That’s not an attack on Pike as a person. It’s not me blindly following a media campaign trying to destroy someone.

It’s me saying that I benefit greatly from generics and more robust error handling, and Go is not likely to have those in the capacity that I want because the whole motivation behind the language was to avoid those things at all costs.

None of which takes away from Pike’s career in its entirety.

Nah man, you are not below me. And those kind of comparisons are ridiculous in any case, which is why I reject the content and tone of Pike's quote there and also many of the value judgements about programmer's 'smarts" that seem to have gone into the development of Go itself. It's that kind of attitude that turns me off entirely (also Google's ridiculous interview process but that's another story).

I'm not sure if Pike himself holds these opinions, or if that quote was just a slip, but it's not nice. TLDR Pike is a 'great' man, with smarts well beyond me, but that's not of a lot of relevance to the code that we (code mechanics / producers) have to write every day, and I found Go tiring and insulting to work with.

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