Comment by ants_everywhere

Comment by ants_everywhere a day ago

15 replies

> they stuck to the practical convenience of solving the problem that they had in front of them, quickly, instead of analyzing the problem from the first principles, and solving the problem correctly (or using a solution that was Not Invented Here).

I've said this before, but much of Go's design looks like it's imitating the C++ style at Google. The comments where I see people saying they like something about Go it's often an idiom that showed up first in the C++ macros or tooling.

I used to check this before I left Google, and I'm sure it's becoming less true over time. But to me it looks like the idea of Go was basically "what if we created a Python-like compiled language that was easier to onboard than C++ but which still had our C++ ergonomics?"

shrubble a day ago

Didn’t Go come out of a language that was written for Plan9, thus pre-dating Rob Pike’s work at Google?

  • pjmlp 10 hours ago

    Kind of, Limbo, written for Inferno, taking into consideration what made Alef's design for Plan 9 a failure, like not having garbage collection.

  • kragen a day ago

    Yes, Golang is superficially almost identical to Pike's Newsqueak.

  • ants_everywhere a day ago

    not that I recall but I may not be recalling correctly.

    But certainly, anyone will bring their previous experience to the project, so there must be some Plan9 influence in there somewhere