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0 pointsein0p1y ago0 comments

Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change it easily. That is important for a programming language, and it doesn’t happen organically.

0 comments

truncate1y ago

Couldn't agree more. Always felt community had trust in the team. Its not the fanciest language, but whatever they push for usually works. In contrast, recently I've had to deal with Swift, and they are often pushing like 10 features, but each of them is full of holes and annoyances. Great respect for doing the boring of keeping it stupid and simple.

gunapologist991y ago

Exactly. And it's in writing!

The backwards compatibility promise:

https://go.dev/doc/go1compat

richardwhiuk1y ago

I suspect all the drama happens internally.

zja1y ago

Are there any Go team members that don’t work for Google? It’s a lot easier to remain civil/avoid drama when people know each other personally, and work together at a big company with an HR department.

markkrj1y ago

Does ex-googler counts? Then Filippo Valsorda...

tomcam1y ago

One reason I consider it so good

Onavo1y ago

They are the programming language equivalent of GitHub repos that maintain a low open issue count by closing most issues as "won't fix" or "won't build".

segfaltnh1y ago

Yep. It takes a lot of bravery and I appreciate it!

lolinder1y ago

Yes. And?

Programming languages more than almost any other type of project end up swamped with thousands of competing requests to implement mutually incompatible features. Some languages do better than others at saying no, and those languages tend to be the ones that achieve widespread adoption.

pansa21y ago

> Some languages do better than others at saying no, and those languages tend to be the ones that achieve widespread adoption.

Unfortunately that’s not at all true - Go is a real outlier here. If it were true, we’d all be writing C instead of C++, Lua instead of Python and ES5 instead of TypeScript.

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ein0pOP1y ago

Good

vdqtp31y ago

The cost being that they [generally speaking] ignore proposals, pull requests, and new features - even if they are valuable to their users and AREN'T breaking.

segfaltnh1y ago

Mostly this comes down to recognizing the value of simplicity. I like Rust and Go, but I am infinitely grateful that Go is as minimal as it is. I wouldn't have had as much success ramping my team on Rust.

moogly1y ago

> almost zero drama

Hm. Wasn't (the lack of) generics pretty drama filled? Especially the way they fought against it for so long.

quectophoton1y ago

s/fought against it/rejected superficial proposals that were mostly about syntax bikeshedding and didn't include enough research on how the proposal would play along with the rest of the language and ecosystem/

ahci8e1y ago

Almost zero drama, yeah. I do remember the dep drama though...

justinclift1y ago

And the telemetry drama.

sidewndr461y ago

Absolutely inaccurate. Pointer de-reference operator had a breaking change after 1.x

arp2421y ago

I don't recall this off-hand; which change was that?

tweenagedream1y ago

I mean they did say almost no breaking changes, depending how much has changed in the language, a small handful of breaking changes in niche use cases may be considered almost none by some. I'm not sure I would say the comment is absolutely inaccurate.

dom961y ago

Zero drama is easy when you get paid (a lot) to work on something.

muratsu1y ago

Huhhh? Have you ever worked at a large enough company where stakeholder interests are not aligned?

IshKebab1y ago

That's private drama. For all we know there has been loads, but it's private so you can't see it.

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Maxatar1y ago

Getting paid has nothing to do with drama. Plenty of high paid people get involved in drama and infighting across all walks of life including tech.

segfaltnh1y ago

Pretty sure Musk gets a decent paycheck, and manages to be involved in plenty of drama.

goalonetwo1y ago

I would rather say that it is easy to have zero drama when most of the committers come from a single large companies.

sangnoir1y ago

And yet we've had lots of drama in Linux and Redhat mailing lists, involving people paid to work on the respective projects, and using their work email.

ein0pOP1y ago

That’s unfair. There’s plenty of drama in projects with all sorts of funding situations. Look at eg Rust. Lots of drama and it’s anyone’s guess if the code you wrote a year ago would work today.

lkirkwood1y ago

> It's anyone's guess if the code you wrote a year ago would work today

Is that true? In what sense? I was under the impression the editions took care of that.

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truncate1y ago

gunapologist991y ago

Exactly. And it's in writing!

The backwards compatibility promise:

https://go.dev/doc/go1compat

richardwhiuk1y ago

I suspect all the drama happens internally.

zja1y ago

markkrj1y ago

Does ex-googler counts? Then Filippo Valsorda...

tomcam1y ago

One reason I consider it so good

Onavo1y ago

They are the programming language equivalent of GitHub repos that maintain a low open issue count by closing most issues as "won't fix" or "won't build".

segfaltnh1y ago

Yep. It takes a lot of bravery and I appreciate it!

lolinder1y ago

Yes. And?

pansa21y ago

> Some languages do better than others at saying no, and those languages tend to be the ones that achieve widespread adoption.

Unfortunately that’s not at all true - Go is a real outlier here. If it were true, we’d all be writing C instead of C++, Lua instead of Python and ES5 instead of TypeScript.

2 more replies

ein0pOP1y ago

Good

vdqtp31y ago

The cost being that they [generally speaking] ignore proposals, pull requests, and new features - even if they are valuable to their users and AREN'T breaking.

segfaltnh1y ago

moogly1y ago

> almost zero drama

Hm. Wasn't (the lack of) generics pretty drama filled? Especially the way they fought against it for so long.

quectophoton1y ago

ahci8e1y ago

Almost zero drama, yeah. I do remember the dep drama though...

justinclift1y ago

And the telemetry drama.

sidewndr461y ago

Absolutely inaccurate. Pointer de-reference operator had a breaking change after 1.x

arp2421y ago

I don't recall this off-hand; which change was that?

tweenagedream1y ago

dom961y ago

Zero drama is easy when you get paid (a lot) to work on something.

muratsu1y ago

Huhhh? Have you ever worked at a large enough company where stakeholder interests are not aligned?

IshKebab1y ago

That's private drama. For all we know there has been loads, but it's private so you can't see it.

2 more replies

Maxatar1y ago

Getting paid has nothing to do with drama. Plenty of high paid people get involved in drama and infighting across all walks of life including tech.

segfaltnh1y ago

Pretty sure Musk gets a decent paycheck, and manages to be involved in plenty of drama.

goalonetwo1y ago

I would rather say that it is easy to have zero drama when most of the committers come from a single large companies.

sangnoir1y ago

And yet we've had lots of drama in Linux and Redhat mailing lists, involving people paid to work on the respective projects, and using their work email.

ein0pOP1y ago

lkirkwood1y ago

> It's anyone's guess if the code you wrote a year ago would work today

Is that true? In what sense? I was under the impression the editions took care of that.

1 more reply

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