<story><title>Rob Pike: Go at Google</title><url>http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.slide</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tikhonj</author><text>What annoys me a little bit about Go (and other projects similarly adherent to &quot;worse is better&quot;) is the implied dichotomy between &quot;research&quot; and making &quot;programming lives better&quot;. Do they think the point of Haskell isn&apos;t to make programming easier? That&apos;s what most of the research into the language is &lt;i&gt;exactly&lt;/i&gt; about! This isn&apos;t just about Haskell either: most other PL research is also about making programming lives easier. And Go ignores essentially all of it.&lt;p&gt;Now, there is even nothing strictly wrong about ignoring research like that. It&apos;s just annoying how they &lt;i&gt;revel&lt;/i&gt; in ignoring all recent progress in the field.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text>Different software communities have different opinions on what makes life better for programmers.&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, programming language researchers are just a subset of those communities with their own sets of beliefs.  On average researchers are much smarter and better educated than most programmers.  However it is likely that the majority of the smartest and best educated people are NOT in academia.  (Before doubting that, remember there is an eternal brain drain of top people from academia to industry for the simple reason that industry pays more.)&lt;p&gt;In the case of the developers of Go, we are talking about people who I believe to be smarter than the vast majority of programming language researchers, and who _definitely_ have more experience around large software systems.  They have come to different opinions about what makes that kind of development work.  People like Ken Thompson and Rob Pike might not be right, but it would be unwise to assume that they are necessarily wrong simply because they disagree with a bunch of programming language researchers.</text></comment>
<story><title>Rob Pike: Go at Google</title><url>http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.slide</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tikhonj</author><text>What annoys me a little bit about Go (and other projects similarly adherent to &quot;worse is better&quot;) is the implied dichotomy between &quot;research&quot; and making &quot;programming lives better&quot;. Do they think the point of Haskell isn&apos;t to make programming easier? That&apos;s what most of the research into the language is &lt;i&gt;exactly&lt;/i&gt; about! This isn&apos;t just about Haskell either: most other PL research is also about making programming lives easier. And Go ignores essentially all of it.&lt;p&gt;Now, there is even nothing strictly wrong about ignoring research like that. It&apos;s just annoying how they &lt;i&gt;revel&lt;/i&gt; in ignoring all recent progress in the field.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cageface</author><text>Haskell is an elegant language but Haskell fans will be much more effective advocates of the language if they admit that it&apos;s conceptually very difficult for most programmers to grasp. Some of the most experienced and capable programmers I&apos;ve ever known have struggled to get their head around Haskell, and I don&apos;t buy the argument that it&apos;s only because their minds have been poisoned by overexposure to other languages.&lt;p&gt;Haskell is important and I&apos;m glad it exists but I think Go has a much better chance of become a plausible alternative to Java and C++ and perhaps Python in most programming shops.</text></comment>