Re: C++ religious war (was: llua Higher-level C API for Lua)

[Hisham <h@...>]

On 21 March 2014 15:38, Jeremy Ong <jeremycong@gmail.com> wrote:
> Elucidate me. What were Go's designers aiming for? A worser Erlang?
>
> My point is that all the stuff they're going for is great and all, but
> there's absolutely nothing unique about what they're trying to
> accomplish as far as I can tell, and there are already options out
> there to do what it does. The language semantics are pretty
> uninteresting and lackluster compared to mutable types in Rust,
> abstract data types in Haskell, process-oriented shared nothing actors
> of Erlang, etc. It's just a prettier java maybe.

IMHO they were aiming for something of _practical usability_. This
doesn't necessarily mean being unique or presenting new concepts that
will make it into programming language theory journals. Most of the
concepts the Bell Labs guys brought together when they made Unix
already existed in other operating systems at a time, often in more
sophisticated ways (well, even the pun in its name reflects this
thinking: Unix < Multics).

I think they looked at the world around them, realized that in spite
of all these advances that get PL people excited, most people out
there are still using stuff like C to get the work done and tried to
come up with something practical for this audience. I think it's a
very worthwhile goal.

-- Hisham

> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Roberto Ierusalimschy
> <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 6:26 PM, Hisham <h@hisham.hm> wrote:
>>> > was born there", implying that it wouldn't be successful if not for
>>> > Google's name). Or did I miss a pun?
>>>
>>> I think Roberto got it exactly; Go's designers knew exactly what spot
>>> they were aiming for, and achieved.
>>
>> Actually I meant exactly the pun that Hisham explained (and then said
>> he did miss it). I do not think Go hit any sweet spot at all, unless
>> what they were aiming was to be cool because it came from Google. I know
>> (and respect) the names of its creators, but I cannot see anything in
>> that language, from a technical point of view, to make it worth being so
>> popular ("so popular" meaning whatever popularity it got).
>>
>> -- Roberto
>>
>