dotGo 2015 - Rob Pike - Simplicity is Complicated

I hadn't been particularly enthusiastic about Go but in the end Rob Pike won me over - "Simplicity is Complicated": [VIDEO] A powerful talk on Silicon Valley history by Kelsey Gilmore-Innis - "What Tech Workers Can Learn From Harry Bridges": [LINK]

It's an active choice of the language to not allow many syntactic sugars that make the code have a much higher learning curve. [VIDEO] is a good overview.

To me it feels like apples to oranges comparison. I watched this talk on strangeloop a long time ago, and a version of this talk given on RailsConf recently (watched recently, not given). Here's what I see on the page: > Complex constructs: State, Object, Methods, Syntax, Inheritance, Switch/matching, Vars, Imperative loops, Actors, ORM, Conditionals. > Simple constructs: Values, Functions, Namespaces, Data, Polymorphism, Managed refs, Set functions, Queues, Declarative data manipulation, Rules, Consistency. And to dig deeper, it makes sense to search for "why state is bad", "why inheritance is harmful", "avoid conditionals", etc., and read whatever you find interesting. Go has particularly simple syntax. Here's a talk by Rob Pike about simplicity, syntax, and language feature you might find interesting [VIDEO]

The creators of Go are Rob Pike and Google. I think they would know if a different GC were better and use it. I used to sometimes doubt Rob Pike too and think Go had made some mistakes. After using Go and listening to his talks (like [0]) I realized how wrong I was. There's a reason he has helped build two wildly successful programming languages.. How many have you built? Are you smarter than Google? In the end, embracing Rob Pike's brilliant decisions and taste has made my programming life so much simpler and better. I switched to Acme [1], turned off syntax highlighting on Gitub PR reviews with a userscript[2], and my life is infinitely simpler. Rob Pike has been right on so many things and has made Go successful. I'm sure if a generational GC were better for Go, he would have built and used it, so you're obviously wrong. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK]

Recently the Go team decided not to add the try-keyword to the language. I'm not a Go programmer and was a bit stumped by the decision until I saw a talk of Rob Pike regarding the fundamental principle of Go to stick to simplicity first. [1] One of the takeaways is, that most languages and their features converge to a point, where each language contains all the features of the other languages. C++, Java and C# are primary examples. At the same time complexity increases. Go is different, because of the simplicity first rule. It easens the burden on the programmer and on the maintainer. I think python would definitely profit from such a mindset. [1] [VIDEO]

> Go just hides the complexity from initial inspection. If you (parent, other readers) haven't seen it, Rob Pike's "Simplicity is complicated" is a good discussion of just this point. video: [VIDEO] slides: [LINK]

the key is simplicity, you're complaining about language features that allow you to write "fun" code, but remember that we spend around 80% of the time reading or debugging code, the main focus of Go is about writing code that's easy to read which will allow you to scale a project or source code with more people, also remember that easy doesn't mean simple, I think these 2 talks will make you understand my idea a little bit better: [VIDEO] [LINK]

I've been thinking a lot lately about why Go, a quite minimalist language by modern standards, has been so incredibly successful in such a short time. It's about a decade old, and is already among the top 5 languages for people starting new OSS projects (at least in my area, which is systems management). Green field development is being done in Go at a rate unprecedented for such a new language, I think. Node/JS might be precedent if we say that Node is a whole new thing, even though it uses JS as its syntax, using it as a server language is pretty new (ignoring Netscape's failed attempts at it in the 90s). I'm tempted to compare it to PHP, which exploded in popularity despite (unarguably, IMHO) better languages existing all around it at the time. Go doesn't seem like a bad language in the way that PHP was a bad language for its first 4~5 major versions, but it does find itself surrounded by many more powerful/expressive languages, and is seemingly getting much faster adoption. I've been learning Go myself, and while I miss some of the features of my normal primary languages (Perl, lately, but also Ruby and Python), I like that I can read other people's Go code without having to look anything up, even though Go is very new to me and I have years experience reading/writing Perl/Ruby/Python. Of course, Perl/Python/Ruby aren't a major paradigm shift away from Go as Haskell is...but, it's still a question of whether it's better to write ten simplistic LOC or two maybe opaque LOC.