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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.
There's already a game called Go, which has about a gazillion articles on how to program it. Couldn't you come up with a name that would be less ambiguous? Now, when you see a user group for "Go programming", you have no clue which one it is.
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Why the hell would anyone use Go?
(Serious question, since our editors didn't tell us why Go was created, what Go's intended purpose was and whether or not anyone is actually using Go.)
Seeing as how it was created after the Internet was big, and one is constantly searching the Internet about the programming language one using, wouldn't you want a distinct name so search results are what the programmer wants? "Go" is the 35th most common word in the English language. When you search for "go" you get entries about games, movies, etc. Google, coincidentally gives the best results if the programming language is what you are searching for, but even Google gives you results for all sorts of things. The programming language isn't even a dominant result on other search engines.
Obviously, if you use a search engine to find things about "JavaScript" or "Erlang" you get what you want. I can't imagine going through the trouble of creating a programming language and then failing to give it a distinctive name.
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What serious long-term real-world potential do you see for Go?
How do you see the potential of Go replacing existing open source webstacks such as Apache and PHP, Python or Ruby? Was Go built with a technology update of existing approaches in mind? How feasible is it in your opinion to try and replace the existing complex stacks with pure Go runtimes?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is there an official cross-plattform Go IDE in the works? Experience shows that adoption is accelerated by offering a solid toolkit that is easy to pick up and get started with - such as the formidable Android Studio IDE Google offers to developers. Are there any plans similar to this for Go?
I would like to see it take the place of C++ in the development of performant end-user applications with GUIs - are there any officially sanctioned projects that aim to provide a serious GUI toolkit and stack based on Go?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"But go get ... reaches out and..." Stop. go get isn't part of the Go langauge; it's the default Go build environment. And yes, it lacks many features you'd want in a so-called "professional" build system (whatever that means this week).
I get the impression that Go was perhaps intended to be used with repo, a tool principally used for managing the Android project, but also used elsewhere inside Google to manage large numbers of independent Git repositories. With repo, you establish a common branch or tag name across all the repositories that comprise your project, then "repo sync" to them. Poof! Build and version management. (Sorta.)
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If your program runs on a machine which is connected to a network then it's an attack vector, even if it doesn't directly offer network services. Look at the huge number of vulnerabilities in things like file viewers or graphics rendering libraries.
Sure, if you're writing an application which you know will only ever be run on airgapped machines with no removable storage then maybe you can not worry about security. Those applications are few and far between.
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In many languages, building code is a language issue. The fact that Go takes a fairly old-fashioned view of batch compilers and separate build systems is just a choice it makes, not a fundamental part of nature. Furthermore, language issue or not, the question simply becomes why are the commonly used build systems for Go so poor.
Now that Go has been in the wild for some time, which parts of the language would you change, and which bits have been an unexpected success?
Are there any plans for Golang version 2, and what might that include?