Interviews: Ask Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan About Programming and Go

Alan Donovan is a member of Google’s Go team in New York and holds computer science degrees from Cambridge and MIT. Since 2005, he has worked at Google on infrastructure projects and was the co-designer of its proprietary build system, Blaze. Brian Kernighan is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. He was a member of technical staff in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs, where he worked on languages and tools for Unix. He is the co-author of several books, including The C Programming Language, and The Practice of Programming. Recently, the pair have co-authored a soon to be released book titled The Go Programming Language. Alan and Brian have agreed to give us some of their time to answer any questions you may have about the upcoming book, Go, and programming in general. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please keep them to one per post.

Comments

Re:Wisdom of naming it "Go"

[OrangeTide]

why couldn't the name have been a SHA-256 hash of the initial specification document or a UUID. So instead of "Go" we could all say "one two three echo four five six seven dash echo eight nine bravo dash one two delta three dash alfa four five six dash four two six six five five four four zero zero zero zero". Then it wouldn't be ambiguous and unlikely to have search collisions if you search as "123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000"

Do you hate go fanboys as much as I do?

[slashdice]

Come on, be honest!