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

[Coroutines <coroutines@...>]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 7:03 PM, Hisham <h@hisham.hm> wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>
>

I agree here, I remember a big point of Go was much shorter build
times.  Being able to rewrite an expansive C++ project in Go and not
waiting half a way for the build to finish.