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Five Years of the Go Programming Language

omar.sahal writes Go celebrates five years of its existence with this blog post recapping a little history, future and some philosophy. "Five years ago we launched the Go project. It seems like only yesterday that we were preparing the initial public release: our website was a lovely shade of yellow, we were calling Go a 'systems language,' and you had to terminate statements with a semicolon and write Makefiles to build your code. We had no idea how Go would be received. Would people share our vision and goals? Would people find Go useful?" The Go programming language has grown to find its own niche in the cloud computing word, having been used to code Docker and the Kubernetes projects. The developers also announced details of further projects to be released, such as a new low-latency garbage collector and support for running Go on mobile devices.

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  1. Re:For those interested... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Go was developed in large part by Rob Pike

    Indeed, and I find it surprising. He seems to think that the reason C++ programmers haven't switched over to go is because it's just too awesome and C++ programmers are too stuck in their ways.

    http://commandcenter.blogspot....

    I do find it disappointing that someone with such an excellent track record would say something so astonishingly ignorant. But I suppose in his mind the cause for not getting C++ programmers must be the fault of C++ programmers, not Go.

    Don't get me wrong: Go seems excellent for doing the things it was designed to do, which is having large groups write internet servers of some sort or another. But it is entirely inadequate for all sorts of other application domains.

    In the two sorts of things I do, namely deep embedded (the Arduino environment rnus C++) and scientific computing, C++ is pretty much the best language out there. In the first case Go simply cannot do that. In the second case, the lack of generics or good builtin containers for vectors, matrices and images makes Go just plain horrible to use.

    Also we C++ programmers have got used to not having to type extra code (like those funny defer lines) or wading through morasses of error checking on the main flow control path.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  2. Re:For those interested... by Necroman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Go is a very opinionated language - IE: the language designers decided a lot of things for you, so you just code in the style that they have outlined. This leads to most code following similar styles and patterns. This improves readability of code from other people greatly.

    The bar for adding specific features to the language itself is extremely high, so the overall language is simple at its core.

    Rob Pike has a good writeup about it from 2 years ago: http://commandcenter.blogspot....

    --
    Its not what it is, its something else.