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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.
Go language differs from many other languages in how it handles Errors. Can you summarize the benefits and drawbacks to the Go language error handling approach when compared to Java for large scale applications.
I'm curious as to the design decisions that led to the way that Go objects are implemented, which feel and seem to operate like C structs w/ function pointers. Yes, all objects are essentially structs with function pointers, but most languages provide a good deal of syntactic and functional candy on top of them to make them more useful. With Go objects, you get sortof-inheritance, sortof-polymorphism, and sortof-encapsulation, which requires re-thinking a lot of design patterns that people learn working with languages like C++, Java, and even PHP. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I can see arguments for forcing people to get out of their comfortable patterns, I'd just like to know why.