38 karma · joined March 27, 2008
Allow me to provide some context [1] for the quote. Shortly after the language was released, somebody was ranting [2] about how Go was not innovative at all in comparison to other modern languages. I was not suggesting that programming research is useless and that we should ignore several decades of progress. I was, rather, saying that Go was applying those several decades of progress to systems programming to produce a more modern version of C. Here is the whole paragraph that quote was lifted from:
"The point the author fails to see is that Go is not meant to innovate programming theory. It’s meant to innovate programming practice. This is an upgrade to C. It’s a language that applies the innovations of the last thirty years to the systems world, where the state of the art is still portable assembler. So no, the language isn’t introducing brilliant new ideas. It’s taking tested old ideas, and introducing them into a new arena."
[1] http://blog.alieniloquent.com/2009/12/15/newsflash-go-is-exp...
Reading code is important. Programmers should read code all the time.