uriel

If anything Go has become simpler and has removed crud since it was introduced.

And that is precisely what gives me hope, Go is going against the trend of almost every other language.

You can always use: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/go-search

No mention of acme? :(

Rob Pike and Russ Cox both use acme on OS X.

See http://acme.cat-v.org

For comparison purposes: The best code I have ever read was written with Sam ( http://sam.cat-v.org ) by Ken Thompson, the second best code I have ever read was written in ed(1) (by Ken and Dennis Ritchie), and the third was probably code written by the rest of the Plan 9 team at Bell Labs written using mostly acme ( http://acme.cat-v.org ).

P.S.: Both sam and acme were written by Rob pike (ken wrote ed), in Plan 9 circles some people would call acme 'an ide', and while I use acme, I would consider sam a better text editor in part because it is precisely just: a text editor and nothing else.

The people who created Plan 9 (and Unix) this days are working on something that has a better chance of blowing a hole through the huge mess that is modern software: Go ( http://golang.org )

I might be naive, but Go is the only thing that has given me some hope for the future of software development in recent times, it means there is a chance that maybe some day I will be able to write software in an environment and with tools that are not byzantine hideously insane piles of layers gratuitiously complex crud.

Hell, with Go you completely bypass even libc (but unlike Plan 9, you still can take advantage of the hardware and software support of existing operating systems/kernels, that sadly are an unavoidable mess, which is one of the things that made it impossible to adopt in practice).

Reminds me of one of my favorite Feynman quotes:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." — Richard P. Feynman, minority report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident ( http://quotes.cat-v.org/science )

- read Strunk & White.

This is interesting in view of Go's convention to use the ending -er for interface types (Reader, Writer, ...) rather than the implementations of those interfaces.

For more documentation and papers see: http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/

I used to be a huge Inferno fan, but with Go around (Rob and Ken both worked on Inferno, Rob was even responsible for the name), I wonder how relevant it is this days.

Go has a much more vibrant community and development is blindly fast. Given Go's dramatic memory efficiency advantages over Java I would hope Google will push it on Andriod soon.

Go code can already run on Android, but building Android apps in Go is another matter, but with Brad Fitzpatrick moving from the Android to the Go team recently, I'm optimistic.

The security concerns about WebGL are not "whitewash".

John Carmack: "I agree with Microsoft’s assessment that WebGL is a severe security risk. The gfx driver culture is not the culture of security."

http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/81732190949486592

Off topic: Proper, consistent and through UTF-8 support is one of the various reasons I'm starting to prefer Go to Pytho. It is sad that Python 3 didn't take the opportunity to properly fix this.

It probably does, but doubt anyone has bothered to check.

> The idea of exceptions is not primarily reading out details from the throw exception object, but to let programmers code the "happy flow" as if errors can not happen.

The problem is that errors can and will happen, and exceptions make the control flow of error handle unpredictably convoluted.

From a control flow point of view exceptions are worse than COMEFROM.

> It also makes it easier to let callers further up in the call-chain to set the policy of of what to do in case of an error.

Callers that do not have any of the real context in which the error happened, and that often can't do anything particularly smart about it other than throw their hands in the air.

> Reddit commenters seems to take some pride that they are not as worse as their cousins at 4chan or youtube.

As a redditor for >5 years, I'm not sure they can claim even that anymore.

> In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works.

I can't blame him for suffering from Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: http://harmful.cat-v.org/journalism/gell-mann-amnesia-effect

Another sad thing (credit for noting this goes to Rob Pike years ago) is that after years of development and hundreds of thousands of lines of code web browsers still don't support searching with regexps! (Hell, Chrome doesn't even support case sensitive search.) I'm sure there are extensions for this, but the browser is in an infinitely better position to implement this consistently and reliably.

This is a feature ed had 40 years ago.

And if PHP was Japanese it would commit Seppuku.

See the paper by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan 'Program Design in the UNIX Environment' (aka 'cat -v considered harmful'):

http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/

I wonder the same, but from people I trust and what I do know, it seems that they are better than pretty much anything else being published this days. Their Science and Tech section is clearly not better than alternatives, and in many ways much worse.

The Economist has been in favor of full legalization of all drugs for decades now. Fun fact: Milton Friedman was also strongly in favor of legalization, and he even convinced his friend and Reagan's Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

Even more fun fact: the National Review has also been pro-legalization for ages, as was William F. Buckley Jr.

Avoiding the overhead of python's startup time alone would be nice, hg is impressively fast for being written in Python, but could be much faster and memory-efficient in a compiled language where you have control over memory layout.

And that is without going into the potential of perhaps taking advantage of concurrency and parallelization for some things.

What i would like to see is an Hg implementation in Go.

Their coverage of world politics and other topics is also very good. Only the Science and Technology section is appallingly and depressingly bad.

Their Science and Technology section is tabloid-grade garbage. The rest is excellent and way better than what you can find almost anywhere else.

Problems like having to patch and build your own Java runtime because (if you are lucky and there is a working one) because Sun made it illegal to distribute modified Java distributions that had not passed the test-kit, and everyone should know that Sun/Oracle do not give access to the test-kit to anyone that doesn't pay them a ton of $$$.

> I'd love to try a strict language, having used only Clojure and Python lately. Playframework might be an alternative.

Try Go.

I still can't believe GWT is not an April Fools joke, and I'm stunned that anyone ever took it seriously.

I have maintained Java apps running on FreeBSD servers, it was a nightmare. And don't even dream of doing that in OpenBSD (which IMHO is the sanest BSD and even nix around).

You would be better off with a language that gives you much more control over memory layout, for example Go.