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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

In my personal view, I find it disappointing that someone like Brian Kernighan, as a co-author of C, only got as far as Go. I would have loved it much more to see him working on a language like Rust, that actually seems to point to the future of programming languages (or does its best at it), while Go looks like a stopgap and a dead end right from the beginning.

Go seems a fine piece of engineering in so far as it directly implements Google politics & some of their technical interests, but it's of little use outside of that, despite all the hype. A pity, really.

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C wasn't a particularly groundbreaking or future building language either. It basically just took a bunch of well known features from some popular languages at the time and packaged them together in a way that directly made it easier for Ritchie to solve the problem he was working on at the time (developing and porting Unix).

So as such Go and C have much in common.

edit: Originally wrote Kernighan instead of Ritchie. Kernighan as far as I know had nothing to do with the design or creation of C.

FWIW, I love C for what it is. When I learned C, I came from Assembler so C felt like a perfect fit; its thin layer of abstraction wasn't too much of a learning curve and a very welcome addition to the tool chest. I just would have hoped for Go to make a “bigger” jump than C did at its time.

In my personal view, I find terribly arrogant to find disappointing how far Brian Kernighan has got. Even only what he has done between C and Go is more than most successful careers.

Fair enough.

Go and Rust are allies, not enemies. Rust is a language driven by a goal, not by blind ideology, and that goal is to make the world a safer place by leveraging memory safety in a low-level context. Given that Go is also memory safe in its default configuration, any C or C++ service that is rewritten in Go still has the effect of making the world a safer place.

Programming languages are a means, not the end!

That I agree.

Regardless of I and others might think about Go's design, every user application that gets written in Go instead of C or C++ (assuming C like code instead of proper safe C++14), is an improvement on the current torrent of CVE exploits.

That's certainly true. I was remiss in not qualifying my statement better

I've had tons of fun with Go, and I've also used it in real production code!

I don't think it is really fair to say he "only" made it this far. It's something that actually brings enjoyment and productivity to possibly millions of people!

BASIC brought enjoyment and productivity to possibly millions of people. That doesn't mean there's nothing better.

That's true, but it also doesn't mean BASIC wasn't an accomplishment!

Brian is not the co-author of C, he wrote most of K&R however.

C was created by Thompson and Ritchie. The book was written by Kernighan and Ritchie. As a result Thompson's contribution is often forgotten, which is a shame.

Why... that isn't what they do. There are people more qualified that actually are working on the future.

More qualified because Kernighan isn't a programming languages researcher, what he has done and does may be great, but just because he is great in one section of computer science doesn't mean there is any reason to expect or even want him or others to venture into other sections just because.

I think this comment is awesome and makes total sense if you read it in Comic Book Guy voice.

Actually, I think Comic Book Guy voice works for so many of the comments that get downvoted on HN. There should be set of tags that mods can put around a comment to signify "relevant and humorous if read with Comic Book Guy voice", so that the community doesn't miss out on comedy gold.

OMG, I can't upvote this enough :)

Your reply seems to have gotten some downvotes (probably from people who can't take everything seriously enough), so I'm making a point of giving you the one upvote I have. I did something to deserve this reply so you shouldn't be punished for it.

Good for you. I upvoted this reply. We need more humor in the world, and someone who can take a joke deserves the upvote.

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