— Ingo Molnar
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9906.0/0746.ht... to the Linux Kernel mailing list in 1999.
So often you see people ranting about the Go team either being ignorant or scornful of PL research.
I always wonder if those same people are Agile Manifesto zealots at work.
> "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike"
> "It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical. – Rob Pike"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16143918
If you're interested in a critique that goes more deeply into Go's actual design flaws, as opposed to its deliberate design tradeoffs, I enjoy https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-....
What a great thread supporting the choices that Linus & the core team made at the time, given the hindsight we now have.
I'm not sure I would have agreed with Linus in '99 (and I was doing a Phd in the OS networking space then!).
Your bigger picture quote is great too. In academia it is easy to get yourself stuck in local minima, unable to see the better path beyond the hill of similar research surrounding you.
Edit: here's a live mirror. http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9906.0/0746.html
> platitudes hardly provide compelling evidence for ignoring 20 years
> of networking/OS research and architecting unnecessary copies into the.
> core of an OS that wants to be taken seriously...
dont forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.
-- mingo<endquote>