I hate to say this, as I'm generally optimistic towards most developments like this, but over the last decade I've become so apathetic towards anything and everything from Google. They've lost so much mindshare and credibility. Their org structure leads to stagnation left, right and centre.
I'd rather tolerate the poor status quo in React land than take any sort of bet on Google getting something "newish" right.
It wasn't always like this.
As a Goolgle user and long time admirer, there have certainly been some disappointments and mistakes over the years. But there’s also been some major accomplishments which people sometimes overlook.
While still early, Waymo seems to be on the right trajectory and may be a key player in autonomous vehicles. Let’s not forget Googles work on transformers, which is heavily responsible for the current AI boom. That’s just two that come to mind, I’m sure there are others. Maybe these were started before Sundar, but he’s been CEO for almost 9 years now. So he gets credit.
Google may have some culture challenges to work through, brain drain, and identity issues. But I don’t think their story is written just yet. With a giant stock pile of cash they have plenty of time and resources to buy or figure their way out of any perceived issues (if that’s even what they need to do).
Microsoft did it. And if you really want to have your mind blown, go take a look at IBMs stock chart. I didn’t expect to see it approaching an all time high.
I think Google's market cap is increase _despite_ Sundar, not because. That said, Google does have enough resources to turn it around, I just don't think Sundar is the right person to do it.
> I just don't think Sundar is the right person to do it
That was sort of my point. Does Google need to be turned around? All stock metrics and revenue metrics show that they are doing well as a company.
Sure the AI model stuff was embarrassing. But it doesn’t seem to be having an impact on the value of the company. Maybe goodwill was hurt. But if we’ve learned anything from the Meta drama over the years, people will be quick to forget about it. I don’t think a few fixable and public missteps like that will sink the company. Does anyone outside of tech even know about it? It’s possible it’s indicative of a larger internal issue thats brewing. But it’s not impacting the value of the company… yet at least.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/478176/google-public-clo...
If google had proper leadership, the company would easily be worth twice it's current value. Easily. Instead we have a situation where raw capitalist inertia is carrying the company forward, while active discussions of the company are ridden with grievances and frustrations. Grievances and frustrations in a market where there are competitors that users can flee to. It's a bad spot to be in.
There is no reason Google shouldn't be the ones on the cusp of releasing GPT-5 level LLMs. None. Instead however they have a middling LLM that is scared to mention white people. So back to the drawing board so they can work out the racial kinks, while the competition blasts past them.
Google needs big company technology focused leadership 5 years ago. But tomorrow would be good too.
My points were focused on the fact that the data just doesn’t currently show Google failing or declining as a company.
It’s going to be really interesting to see how the Google AI strategy plays out. I agree that they could have absolutely been the leader. They had the money, resources, and ingredients to make it happen.
I believe that AI is a threat to their current business model. How much did that influence their investment and focus on it?
At the time of this news, Google's stock fell 5 percent, so it is hurting company evaluation, at least temporarily.
Google's stock might be rising, but what is causing that? I can't point to any material success of Google in the last 10 years to explain it, seems to me Google is coasting.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-parent-alphabet-re...
But then again, it may just be because they employed the rockstars (Rob Pike, Ken Thomson, and Robert Griesemer) to work on it.
I suppose it's less about the company, and more about who the company chooses to work on the project.
Okay, watching this video, and they just infantized their audience "if someone makes you uncomfortable, come find a staff" as if the conference goers aren't adults. That makes me really uncomfortable that they think adults can't handle themselves and work things out.
Java has just copied some parts of how concurrency works in Go, but that's nearly 20 years after Go was released.
It's extremely easy to start up code concurrently with "go foo()". You can start up lots of such functions concurrently, as it works in userspace. Like async code, but no "colored functions" problem.
The difference is that now red and green threads are exposed at the API level, and not an implementation detail.
Hardly copying Go.
Go 1.0 was released in 2012.
Here are a few on top of my head:
1) CSP concepts embedded deeply into the language (goroutines/channels/select) making concurrency easy to do correctly
2) Standard Library and Go toolchain providing everything that most languages use third party libraries for (formatting, testing, benchmarking, fuzzing, HTTP, crypto, etc...)
3) Compilation into a static binary that can just be copied from machine to machine without any dependencies whatsoever (even C struggles with that on Linux, due to glibc NSS fiasco)
4) Cross-compilation by changing two environment variables
5) Minimalistic distribution system - just write `import "github.com/person/repository"` - no need for packaging, pom.xml, requirements.txt, package.json, etc.
6) Interface-based modularity (structural typing), making code reuse much easier than the usual OOP-style abstract-class based modularity (nominal typing)
7) Extremely fast compilation, which makes read-modify-run development loop as fast as with interpreted languages
2) .NET, Java, Smalltalk, Common Lisp
3) Any compiled language until the mid-1990's.
4) Amsterdam Compilers Toolkit, 1980
5) Until the repo changes, forbids distribution of binary libraries
6) Standard ML, Caml Light, OCaml, Haskell,...
7) Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MS-DOS computers running at 7 MHz, with 640KB.
Additionally:
- Erlang does not implement CSP, it implements Actor model
- Java does NOT have all the listed features included in its default toolkit - hence the existence of Gradle, Maven and all other packaging/testing/benchmarking solutions
- The "until mid 1990's" is the keyword here - I'm talking about modern languages and I explicitly pointed that out
- ACT is not part of any language, it is an external tool that may or may not be reliable, but definitely does not have toolchain/standard library level of quality/stability guarantee.
- "Until the repo changes" - packages can disappear from any system, see leftpad incident
- "forbids distribution of binary libraries" - not true, see [0]
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nr-TQHw_er6GOQRsF6T43GGh...
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However, if I have misread your tone, and your post was intended to be an informative list of languages Go was inspired by, then thanks for the information. But some of it is misleading or false.
I could go over those points, one by one into detail, including Russ Cox point of view on disabling binary distribution, but not feeling motivated to press the further the wound.
Implementing, sometimes quite poorly, all 7 categories does not a revolution make.
Golang looked at the past 60 years of programming evolution and decided it needed almost none of it, and ignored any developments in programming languages of the past thirty years or so. This is not revolutionary. It is, at best, reactionary.
- No tail call optimization
- No meta-programming
It is basically a revamp from those rockstars previous efforts (Limbo and Oberon based dialects).
Google’s AI strategy is as clear as Nokia’s smartphone software strategy was.
May 2010 - August 2010.