The Go Programming Language
golang.org
golang.org
I'm actually happy! It means my stupid little language has some validity :P
For those who wish to deride it: http://code.google.com/p/prism/
I feel as if string and map simply could have been part of the standard library. My solution to the this for prism was to have a section of the standard library (which doesn't exist yet) marked as "integral", to effectively have an implicit "import string, map from std.__integral__" at the top of every translation unit.
The absence of overloading operators seems to contradict their claims of improving the visual "flow" and feel of programming. There are cases where savvy operator overloading works wonders: vectors/matrices/quaternions, strings, complex numbers, etc. To be able to write my_string + my_other_string is far more elegant than strcat(my_string, my_otherstring). Consider what happens when you have four of five strings you'd like to concatenate!
The choice of CSP reflects Google's mentality: Their problems lend themselves very well to CSP. Other domains (in my opinion) work better with a STM model. But that's clearly a design choice, and I think it's fine!
However, you can write "abc" + "def" in Go and it does what you expect.
a + d = e (1 + 4 = 5 = e) b + e = g (2 + 5 = 7 = g) c + f = i (3 + 6 = 9 = i)
I think he was making a joke about how + with strings doesn't necessarily mean string concatenation.
If in your language, + means string concatenation by convention, then + darn well means string concatenation. If in your language + means "contextually appropriate depending on what arguments you pass to it", then
"abc" + "def" => "egi"
doesn't strike me as obviously wrong.
More broadly, consider a language in which we teach initiates that "Plus adds things in the way you'd expect!"
map = {}
map2 = map + {"key" => "contents"}
What are the contents of map and map2 now? Uh oh. More worrisome:
map = MemcachedWrapper.new
map2 = map + {"key" => "contents"}
What just happened?
1) I did say 'savvy'. Sort of because I don't get to use that word enough, but also because it is possible to abuse operator overloading. String concatenation with the addition operator isn't going to suprise anyone, even if you come from another language (well, it might, but the choice of the + operator isn't an unintuitive one). Furthermore, nobody's jumping at things with well-defined operators, like vectors/matrices, etc. I've written very little outside of a maths library that used operator overloading, but it's a godsend for the cases where it's appropriate... probably a truism.
Secondly, they're just functions. You can look them up (y'know, assuming you can), you can optimise them, and you can document them. A programmer encountering an operator doesn't have to rely on their interpretation alone, and indeed shouldn't. They should know what that operator does. Now of course, if the operator has absolutely no contextual reason for existing, or is suprising divergent from its apparent purpose... well, see point 1.
As for your example, how do you do a greater-than-or-equal comparison on strings? :D
Avoiding operator overload doesn't avoid poorly named methods, nor does it avoid the need for documentation. All that it does is force programmers to do ugly things when dealing with math, and there is a lot of math-based programming out there.
It looks like C with some very carefully chosen additions: memory safety, concurrency and maps.
"Go is mostly in the C family (basic syntax), with significant input from the Pascal/Modula/Oberon family (declarations, packages), plus some ideas from languages inspired by Tony Hoare's CSP, such as Newsqueak and Limbo (concurrency). However, it is a new language across the board."
Two of the designers were Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, both instrumental developers of Unix/C and Plan9/Inferno. Thompson created the B programming language that C was based on.
I'm excited to see CSP in Go. I've been advocating its use for concurrency since I learned about Plan 9's channels, but most people paid no attention.
And the goal, as they mention, seems to have the efficiency of a statically-typed compiled language with the ease of programming of a dynamic language but with -
Safety: type-safe and memory-safe.
Good support for concurrency and communication.
Efficient, latency-free garbage collection.
High-speed compilation.
They are aiming at a lightweight type system with no implicit conversions and no more 0x80ULL.
A good starting point is their FAQ page and also the tech talk at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s
> Any type that has the named methods [...] is said to implement the interface.
For instance, in the tutorial, the cat function takes a reader interface. fmt.Print and Println a type will output whatever its String() "method" output. This is what Python does, e.g. "print x" is eqv. to "print x.__str__()".
To my understanding (and admittedly, while I've been using Python since around 1.5, I've largely abandoned it for Lua), 'Pythonic' is usually used to refer to the clearly preferred way of doing something that may have multiple implementations - Python's community making explicit the observation of conventions such as "for (i=0; i<N, i++) {" in C.
Using a dict rather than an int-indexed list is Pythonic, for example, because that's just the way that it's done in idiomatic Python, and the community encourages having one preferred idiom for common tasks. I don't think the concept applies to language features such as garbage collection.
You're already marking up the code for humans using indentation, don't repeat yourself by having the compiler use a different parsing mechanism (and make developers mark up seperately for their colleagues and the compiler).
Wearing braces is optional. It's only the beards that are mandatory.
They're like guard rails on the highway, they make totally explicit what is going on.
The 'but you're writing for other humans to read' argument imho is not 100% the truth, you're writing for both the computer and other humans to read.
Humans like the indentation, the braces make it explicit.
The computer doesn't care about the indentation, it just looks at the brackets.
Drop a bracket and you get an error, drop a couple of spaces and your program will happily continue to work, only not in the way you intended.
it's funny how even in languages that don't use 'begin/end' markers (such as python) there are extraneous characters, such as the () pair when calling a function (surely there are ways to do without that ?), or when making a list or a dictionary.
Some things come in pairs, and the beginnings and endings of blocks are such things.
In Pascal it was BEGIN and END, which seemed overly verbose, in C it was { and }, which seems about as minimal as you can go before you become invisible, and when you get invisible you lose something.
Try cutting and pasting some python examples from online fora and see how well it works without.
And try figuring out from a python program that has been created on a box with alternate tab settings what it's intended function was (yes, I know there are tools for that situation).
Begin and end block have meaning, they are 'there', and even if you don't strictly speaking need them they cost next to nothing and make me feel a lot more like things are spelled out to mean exactly what I'm reading.
I should probably start collecting python examples in the wild on the web where the indentation is clearly messed up so the code no longer works the way it is intended, this is a lot more common than you'd want. It is also very frustrating when learning a language.
So, please keep those braces.
'They're like guard rails on the highway, they make totally explicit what is going on.'
Using this logic, perhaps you should add some ASCII art to your source to denote blocks a third time? This is also a common practice. Do you feel the same about duck typing?
'The 'but you're writing for other humans to read' argument imho is not 100% the truth, you're writing for both the computer and other humans to read.'
Yes, that's true the computer also parses the code. You still haven't provided an argument why using seperate blocking formats is required.
'they cost next to nothing and make me feel a lot more like things are spelled out to mean exactly what I'm reading.'
The cost is evident: there are many cases of indentation not matching braces and vice versa, and the inconsistency between these causing confusion between the language and the humans trying to debug issues.
Tell me you've never looked for an unmatched brace in code you can otherwise parse?
I disagree. I know that the word "redundant" sometimes carries a negative connotation, but the truth is that it is a mere property whose value depends upon the context and associated tradeoffs.
Spacecraft have redundant systems, but those systems are far from superfluous.
Human languages have built in redundancies. Generally they are there for ensuring communication still happens in a noisy environment.
My music CDs have redundancy in the encoding, and thankfully at that: after years of accumulating scratches I could still rip them without loss of quality. Redundancy was a positive here too.
Redundancy is a tradeoff, not an automatic downside.
What loss are you preventing by requiring blocks be delimited twice?
Have you considered that inconsistencies due to repetition are frequently themselves cites as a cause of data loss?
Ever had code that looks good to you but doesn't parse because a machine is expecting an extra bracket?
I think jacquesm already mentioned the value of the redundancy above: you will never have a situation where a change in indentation leaves you with a runnable, but semantically-different program when you pasted code from a forum or from a machine with different tab settings. Note how the missing-bracket case in your last question is superior to this: a missing bracket offers fail-fast detection of the problem. If you indent a line wrong your program may still run, but differently: indent the last line of a block at the wrong level and it may happen after a loop rather than inside a loop.
The indentation is for the person. The braces are for the compiler. I like this, personally. I understand how some may prefer the python way (it has a superficial elegance, after all). But I personally don't like the downsides that jacquesm mentioned.
In that situation, with any computer language, you'll have an unreadable program. In Python, you'll need to fix the readability before the program will execute - which is a win to me.
for foo in bar:
foo.fizzle()
baz.wibble()
for foo in bar:
foo.fizzle()
baz.wibble()
Python executes your data the same way you yourself parse it: by how it appears. Brace requiring languages execute your data using different rules than you use to parse it.
Redundancy of logic is universally known to be a poor engineering practice.
Achilles: Why do you want to wear a helmet?
Tortoise: So that I won't hurt my head if I bump it.
Achilles: You won't bump it.
Tortoise: Suppose I do.
Achilles: You won't bump your head.
Tortoise: But suppose, hypothetically, that I fall off my bike and bump my head. What would protect it from injury?
Achilles: Your head is not injured, because you didn't bump it.
Tortoise: But that's the very basis of my hypothesis!
Achilles: Yeah, I'm going to just ignore you said that, and tell you again that you won't bump your head.
Tortoise: How do you know?
Achilles: Because you made sure that it didn't come into contact with anything.
Tortoise: Good night, dear Achilles. May you encounter others like you.
Fortunately, Python gives you:
* A helmet. It won't parse unblocked code like any other language.
I'm not sure why you think blocking a second time with brackets would improve things or avoid this risk. But hey, if you want to wear a second helmet, that's cool. May you encounter others like you. :^)
* A mirror where things are as large as they appear (the blocking looks like it executes), unlike other languages where these can get out of sync and cause problems. If you enjoy this risk, that's awesome. High five.
* A handy warning light should you accidentally stray too far to the wall (Python will telling you that your readability is broken at the same time it tells you your blocking is - and you only need one fix). If you'd prefer not to be told about this, two places to fix things, and enjoy receiving badly written code, that's your prerogative and who am I to say anything other than that it's not mine.
Achilles: Nice bike and helmet.
Tortoise: No!
Achilles: Er, ok. Could you explain?
Tortoise: I need to get a helmet!
Achilles: You're already wearing one.
Tortoise: But what if I fall?
Achilles: You're wearing a helmet, which will protect you.
Tortoise: But I need to get a helmet.
Achilles: No you don't, you're wearing one. Oh and by the way, you need to be visible at night. The helmet's reflective, so you probably don't want to cover it with another ...
Tortoise: You're not listening to me!
Achilles: I am listening, but I'm also disagreeing. Are you listening to my disagreement?
I apologize for wasting your time with my attempt at putting in to words what I was thinking, at your request no less.
Let me give you a simple example, in two psuedo languages, one with and one without braces:
if a > b
a = a + 5
b = b / 2
if (a > 0) {
a = a + 5
b = b / 2
}
if a > b
a = a + 5
b = b / 2
if (a > b) {
a = a + 5
b = b / 2
}
That's not 'ascii art', that's functional.
Redundancy definitely has it's uses.
I'm going to do some digging later on and find a bunch of examples of broken code due to cut & paste problems, some of it on the django site, no less.
That's something that would never happen in C or any other 'overspecified' language.
And regarding 'finding that matching bracket' that is exactly what they're for, if you can't match the bracket chances are that you really do have a problem in the code.
if a > b
a = a + 5
b = b / 2
if a > b
a = a + 5
b = b / 2
The point is that you can't know which one was the one that was meant to be written there in the first place, and all that changed is some literally invisible characters are gone.
It's like with comments and code, if a comment says 'add two volumes' and I see that the code does not do that then I have a hint that something is not correct.
It could be the comment or it could be the code, but there is something smelly there.
Redundancy = good.
Er, no. That's not the extent of the changes at all: the very visible code has shifted to the left. I refuse to believe you cannot see that with your own eyes.
'The point is that you can't know which one was the one that was meant to be written there in the first place'
In any language at all, the lack of indentation makes it quite clear the intention is different.
You asked what benefit might come from the redundancy of a curly brace, and this was a scenario in response.
Python also has the handy benefit of telling you this immediately.
jacquesm's statement about the visible difference is obviously false.
However I don't think it's doing anyone any good to keep contributing on this topic. All I was doing was making a suggestion to improve something. The troll who posted 'no' with no arguments has a bunch of supporters, I'm being moderated down to nothing. You're not responding to my points, and you seem to think I'm not listening to you, though I'm trying to understand what you're saying. I give up, this isn't worth it.
This problem only exists if indentation is significant in the language as a way of demarcating blocks. This is exactly the reason for the suggested syntactic redundancy. A reasonable person can accept the tradeoff, but it's not reasonable to insist that the tradeoff isn't there at all.
Edit: the proposed scenario is readable code. It is, in fact, disingenuous to ignore that. It isn't candid to claim apathy, either.
If you find that disingenuous, fine, I don't care anymore.
Edit: you consider badly indented code readable? You must be great fun to work with. :^)
I bet you meant "semantically correct" instead. Yes, every program's semantics need to be correct in order for the program to be correct. That's a tautology, and it's a deflection from the subject of the tradeoff analysis that you requested upthread.
You're probably a bundle of joy to work with, too. :^)
if (a > b) {
a = a + 5
b = b / 2
}
Ie:
* Python and similar languages would execute the code consistently with how it looks. This is good.
* A brace-requiring language would execute the code in a way that is not consistent with how it looks. This is not good.
Scroll up: I didn't request any analysis, I made a suggestion. Someone posted a blank 'no', and I asked them for a more civil explanation of their views.
Yeah, that's the request I was referring to.
Python and similar languages would execute the code consistently with how it looks. This is good.
It's good and bad. You win something, you give up something. This is the nature of a tradeoff. It's not like Python lives in an alternate universe where tradeoffs don't exist. But I'm beginning to think its advocates live in one where tradeoffs are invisible in broad daylight.
Having an opinion thrust at you does not equate to soliciting said opinion.
It's your responsibility to clearly state the benefits of what you're advocating. You don't seem to be able to do that.
I suggest you examine your own courteousness.
The () when calling a function with no arguments is not extraneous -- because Ruby lets you omit that, it needs yet another function type to disambiguate when you want a reference to a method (total of 4: Methods, Procs, Lambdas, and Blocks).
What is completely superfluous in the syntax is the colon preceding an expression suite -- you're already using a keyword and indenting the next line(s).
if x == foo:
# do things
if y == bar:
# do something
# do other stuff <-- at what indent level should this line live?
# get on with life
Now, it's true that in this simple case, you could rewrite the snippet starting with:
if x == foo and y == bar:
# ...
# get on with life
As a result, in my Python code, I use otherwise gratuitous pass statements all over the place–ugly, but it does the trick.
if x == foo:
# do things
if y == bar:
# do something
pass
# do other stuff <-- at what indent level should this line live?
pass
# get on with life
This would be allowed:
if x == foo {
# stuff
# more stuff
}
if x == foo {
# stuff
# more stuff <-- BAM!
}1. It mixes format with logic. Don't we all know this is one of the greatest evils one can commit?
2. Indentation is a bitch to parse compared with braces. Violates occam's razor of software of engineering -- simpler is better. Unnecessary complexity is the second greatest evil in software engineering.
3. Indentation is neither symmetrical nor logically unique. Therefore you can't delete all the formatting from a python program and expect a formatter to get it right. With symmetric braces a formatter always knows exactly what logical level it should be on by counting the number of closed braces; not possible with python's goofy system.
4. All that tiresome debate and worry over tabs versus spaces.
5. One can't really say "braces are redundant not indents" or "indents are redundant not braces". Redudency is commutative. I would say braces are for computers, indents are from human; it is simple to go from braces to indents but not so in the other direction.
Just a note -- I will always pick Python over any other scripting language. I just think the indentation is a serious mistake; there are so few other bad choices it tends to irk me that much more.
Re: parsing, read each line, if the indent is greater than the current indentlevel, add line to a new block, else, add line to existing block.
Tabs were considered harmful before Python, they're still considered harmful now.
You could add braces to Python quite easily, I think this has already been done in jest a few times...
It says great things about Google that these all clearly started as projects that they assumed nobody would ever have to Google. (Although http://www.google.com/chrome is now #1 for [chrome]).
"package management for go programming language" or "XML parser go programming language" probably won't be so useful, and it is sure cumbersome to type.
The man:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry
The myth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibology
The lore:
(I feel old, now. Time to think about learning a new language.)
I'd expect: the game, then the language. Certainly not go.com
Actually, in their case, I think it's more that they want to choose names are a mix between commonly-used word and one that is similar to an already existing product. Wordperfect --> Word, Netscape Navigator --> Explorer, OO.o XML --> OOXML, etc.
Now from the technical point of view, there are a few interesting points like the threading approach, but in general the language does not appear to provide great new ideas, nor to be a language where consolidated ideas are put together very elegantly.
It seems like that for system programming the "better C" that one could need is different than this, while for general programming what is really missing is something like Ruby and Python but made as fast as C and with low memory usage by mean of doing the right sacrifices to the language, but still retain most of the abstraction level.
Go is not as powerful as C++, not as high level as Java, not as raw as C for low level stuff. I don't like it.
Go is exactly what you're asking for in your third paragraph -- it seems you were blinded by the curly braces...
Go is simple and fast. It has garbage collection, it facilitates parallel programming and it does away with lots of useless OO cruft. At first sight I like it.
hg log --rev 0:4 --template '{date|isodate}\t{author}\n\t\t\t\t{desc|firstline}\n\n'
1972-07-18 19:05 -0500 Brian Kernighan <bwk>
hello, world
1974-01-20 01:02 -0400 Brian Kernighan <bwk>
convert to C
1988-04-01 02:02 -0500 Brian Kernighan <research!bwk>
convert to Draft-Proposed ANSI C
1988-04-01 02:03 -0500 Brian Kernighan <bwk@research.att.com>
last-minute fix: convert to ANSI C
2008-03-02 20:47 -0800 Robert Griesemer <gri@golang.org>
Go spec starting point.Annoyances: braces; variable declarations more verbose than in C
Flaws: no discriminated unions; no generics or parametric polymorphism
Doubts: no exceptions; no macros (as far as I can tell)
Edit: I take back the verbosity claim. := does inference
Edit2: interfaces replace generics, but are
type-checked at runtime, apparently:
http://golang.org/doc/go_for_cpp_programmers.html#InterfacesI am not sure why I'd use this language with no libraries when I could use a better-designed language with no libraries instead.
ch := make(chan int);
go sum(hugeArray, ch);
// ... do something else for a while
result := <-ch; // wait for, and retrieve, result
While I agree that they need to add exceptions, they do have some interesting things in there already.
Generics are being worked on (according to the tech talk), but they haven't determined the best way to do them yet.
I like this not just because it's CSP reborn -- new languages should be introduced with their own delightful disambiguating nomenclature.
Best of all, no header files!
I did it with a horrible C++ preprocessor hack. It was fun.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/11/go-new-open-...
* Kathy Sierra
* JWZ
* ESR (okay he's a bad coder, but still)
* Zed
* _Why
* The MIT Introduction to Algorithms instructors who clearly spend time making their lectures entertaining as well as informative.
* And yeah, most of the staff at Ars:
DRY dictates not having seperate markup for the compiler and your colleagues - so yes, in that respect, the unnecessary braces in Go are not innovative.
Hey, give MS some credit for F# here! And it's got out of the box support in Visual Studio 2010.
Thanks for giving me something to do with all my free time for the next couple of weeks.
http://golang.org/doc/go_mem.html
If you do things via synchronized channel communication then it eliminates (mostly) the need to spend all your time with mutexes and the like because the channel sync does that work for you. At the beginning it'll probably take people time to get there heads around it, but my recollection was that it was a game changer once you understood how the synchronization worked.
Sorry if that's kind of specific, it's some of the limitations in one of the current problems I'm working on :)
Like I said earlier, there is significant interest inside Google to make it possible to write really low latency services in Go. I personally think 15 usec is reasonable to ask for.
The main quirk I see right now is that the syntax feels more like a shuffling of characters, rather than actually simplifying anything. For instance, they save parentheses in for loops (great idea!), yet suddenly I need a useless "func" before every function. It also seems like there needs to be a default type for arguments, either "int" or "string", for it to feel truly simplified.
A feature I would really, really like to see in a language is the notion of automatically printing lone strings, or automatically printf()-ing lone string format lists. It's a little irritating after all this time that one must "echo" or "print" or System.out.println() or fmf.Printf() everything (much less import standard libraries to do it), when it is such a common task.
After a quick glance, D piqued my interest more. D seems to fall a bit nearer to the C++ side of the fence than Java, but also boasts C++-level performance and relative safety.
http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/217801225
Neither of them will replace C or C++ in the near-term simply because those languages are so entrenched, but if I were looking for a language just to play around in for potential future use from these families, at this point it'd be D.
Interesting so far besides some syntax ugliness and lack of macros, but not yet good enough for many system programming projects, especially given the state of the garbage collector. GC is the hardest thing to implement large-scale, concurrent, memory intensive applications (e.g, database servers). Java spent 18 years to perfect its GC to be the current state of the art, which still sucks for these applications.
I hope they can come up with a concurrent garbage collector that can work on > 16 GBs of RAM with sub ms max latency :)
Hopefully they can rip off the design of GHC's amazing parallel garbage collector (it runs in its own pthread), and ditch the current mark-and-sweep.
So now Google's got its own OS (two actually), browser, and now its own programming language. Anything missing yet? Their own editor / IDE?
I wouldn't imagine this as something that they'd release.
I'd argue their secret sauce, and the parts they wouldn't want to release, are - the insane scaling stuff - all the intelligent things they do with the insane amount of data they have, and the insane rate at which they can process it
They have at least three product OSes: ChromeOS, Android, and The Google Search Appliances.
This is at least their second new programming language project: there's also Rob Pike's Sawzall. They have numerous in-house implementations of existing programming languages: V8, Closure, GWT, Dalvik, Unladen Swallow, plus all the extant ones they maintain forks of.
P.S. No offense, but it's amazing how some people are such Google fans.
Also, I think the zero-prefix convention for octal literals is very confusing and possibly error-prone, but it seems to be used even in modern programming languages. Is there a good reason to keep using '0765' instead of something '0o765'?
I've been wanting this in C# for a while now. Maybe one day...
It's based upon the phrase: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
In this case, if the object has the methods of the duck interface, treat it like a duck object.
I've just been getting in to generic programming with C++ (Stepanov's new book, awesome). So the fact that they don't have templates or operator overloading (the two critical pieces to STL style) was a bit of a downer. That being said the interfaces concept reminded me of generic functions (in CLOS). Sounds pathetic but I probably will give it a try just because it's from Google -- but I'm quite skeptical. With the really interesting work going on with Haskell, Clojure, Fortress, etc. it seems a shame to stay so close to C.
(That's not a criticism—language design shouldn't always be in the revolutionary mode.)
What I mean is that Google always has to do things the Google way whether that's an improvement or not. Whether this turns out to be a valuable contribution to the field will play out over the next few years. We'll see. But a company that makes their own DB, their own phone, their own programming languages, etc. is pretty much a prototypical "not invented here" company.
Google has some unique problems, they also have a unique position in that they probably have pooled the largest number of IT talent world wide.
That gives them clout enough to do these things, just like Erlang came out of a phone company (why, couldn't they have used some existing language ?) and Apple made their own phone (I'm sure they could have afforded a Nokia or two) google can and does have the budget to branch out in other fields.
That's not 'NIH', NIH is doing something even though better alternatives exist, for instance, writing your own bookkeeping software when you're a mid-sized company and you should be spending your time on serving your customers instead of writing bookkeeping software.
Google even makes their own servers, at their levels of scale a lot of things that do not make sense for smaller companies actually improve the bottom line.
Google suffers from many defects, bad customer support would be the top of my list, but NIH isn't one of them, at least not in this case.
That's almost like accusing Xerox in their heyday of having NIH, and I'd hate to think what the world of software would look like today if it hadn't been for that.
Is it too simplistic to say that at one end you have expressive languages designed for humans and at the other you have low level languages designed for speed?
edit: not meaning to insult humans who like fast languages.
I would probably fear that, if I would invest time in learning Go.
I don't understand why the team did release Go to the public at this early stage of development, what they expect from the developer community.
If anyone can bring about a tab reniassance, it's bwk, ken, rob, rsc, and gri. These titans wrote your operating systems and your programming languages. They all wrote their own editors (not sure about gri) -- hell, the Go tests use ed!
Tabs have been lost in the wilderness for too long, it is about time they are reborn!
what advantages this have over
import fmt
that a new language is choosing this sytax?
I do see the reason to design a language efficiently, but I emphatically disagree with optimizing away small numbers of characters. Typing is a basic skill for the job, and the overhead is dwarfed by the text of the program (not to mention that we're making everyone type braces and semicolons).
import fmt "fmt"
Where the quoted fmt is an import path. Not making it a string literal would create a potential clash between characters used in filesystem paths and the Go parser.
Sweet...
[edit: creepy thought... Go logo == the Glenda bunny being thrown at something?]
One could have extra information right beside each submitter/commenter's name (e.g., ... founder, Google employee, PhD in ..., etc.).
And, yes, it would amuse me for a couple of days if everyone with/working on a PhD were encouraged to append their thesis titles after their usernames.
* though yes, for people I don't recognise who are not posting particularly interesting comments, it does not matter who posted them. Such as this comment I assume, anyone could write it.
You later find out from his/her profile that this person is a Google employee and is in a position to know what he/she commented about. It might be too late by then to take back what you wrote.
I remember when I came on here and criticized Delicious and got in an argument with joshu because I didn't know who he was. If anything, I'd like more anonymity, because the people I do know I sometimes tiptoe around.
EDIT: after watching some of the tech talk, it's evident that while Rob Pike is involved, it's not entirely his baby... He is however involved, and there are definitely ideas from newsqueak in the language.
It (go + native client) might become a next major platform. Just think about low-level (and easier to code than C[++]) Javascript alternative.
Google: what is the point? First it's browser plugins, then browsers, then two OS's, now programming languages? How about a nice new processor architecture a la PowerPC? It's better and faster you know. Maybe they'll also invent new people to be their user base. I can imagine that intro video: "Welcome to GPeople - the new Google interaction experience. When you interact with a GPerson you don't need to talk. They already know what you are thinking and will insert relevant advertisement into their conversation with you. The advertisement will be unobtrusive and will target your innermost fears..."
If you think that programming languages are a 'done deal' then try to ignore the last 15 years or so and see what you're left with.
Sure, we're not much closer to the holy grail of programming in absolute terms, but new languages (erlang, clojure, ruby, python to name a few) have definitely incrementally changed the perspective we have of programming, and have opened up more fruitful ways of building certain classes of applications.