Rob Pike: What Golang Got Right & Wrong

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[Intermernet]

Thanks for talking about this talk. Rob is no longer a Go core team member (he's retired now), and explicitly mentions this a few times during the talk, but he sees it as one of his more successful children, and he loves where it's at now. The talk is 100% opinion based content from one of the inventors of the language. It wasn't vetted or approved by anyone from Google, and I don't think he'd conform to anything they would have pushed or suggested for this talk. It's remarkably candid. He also happens to be one of the people who have been around for so long, and invented so much stuff (UTF8 anyone?) that I regard his opinions as worth considering for longer than average.

I had the privilege of being one of the MCs at this conference. I introduced this particular talk, and was running madly around the theater with a mic during Q&A. Rob is a lovely guy, and if you ever have the chance to talk to him he's a fountain of knowledge and stories.

[xslashsdas]

I love how Flip litereally never does anything Prime asks it's pretty funny.

[blk]

I always felt like the Go gopher looked like a simple, well-meaning idiot implying that the Go language is meant to be a fun, simple tool that does what you tell it to do exactly because it can’t do anything else.

[IvanFernandes]

On the one letter variable name thing, I work with a fork of nginx and the core modules are nightmarish to follow because of this. I dread debugging the upstream module a seeing a pointer called c and not sure if it is a pointer to the connection, cache node, cache module, config or what else. Then you jump into a function call and you have another pointer call c which is something else, and you better remember that when you go up the stack again that c no longer means what it meant before. It hurts me physically.

[ernesto]

when i worked in automotive, the project took almost 1 hour to compile from scratch, one Engineer took a couple of months to switch the build system from a collection of make files to cmake+ninja and the new compilation time from scratch was 20 min, we all rejoice.

[suede__]

I like the joke that they wrote Go while waiting for their C to compile.

[davidspagnolo]

Those single letter variables remind me of when I was first writing code.

"I'll surely, remember what this is for"

[rzyr]

I really hoped there would be more about what they did wrong.

[reaganaustin]

One of my professors recounted a story where he interned for an automotive company in detroit, and the mechanical engineers had this software to ensure a component could be manufactured and it took almost 17 hours to complete. He wrote a tool that did the same thing and it only took 6 minutes and the engineers were mad at him

[CyReVolt]

The one-letter thing is aka "Rob Code". He comes from a time when screens were monochrome and space was limited. You can find the same fun in Plan 9 and the Limbo language.
And... well... that made it into Go, I suppose.

[mike]

Is there a Part 2 where he talks about the things Golang got wrong?

[ehh]

The take on Go developer and one letter variables so so true just why 😂

[Wako_san]

"You done messed up Balake!" we're never calling anyone Blake ever again 😂

[TheRandomFool]

From now on, when I need the length of any array-like object, I'll just call it nn. What a good variable name!

[ehhhhhhhhhh]

1:58 I'm fine with a writer named w. But I draw the line at `nn := len(p)`, that is just horrifying.

[abigchair]

Giving credit to the mascot is crazy; saying it has an intelligent demeanor just sent me.

[FrankHarwald]

1:00 As a dev who's comping from the engineering math side of things who has seen a lot of fortran and c code that looks like it's coming from a physics or analysis math book, I disagree that single letter variables are always a bad thing - especially when each of them are confined to clear local scopes & you happen to have to deal with a lot of them at the same time.
if you don't know: using single letter names in math, physics & engineering for local or bounded scoped variables, constants or expression is not just a -decades- centuries old way of writing things, it's also more readable when you get more complicated expression. But granted, the stuff that this go-programmer wrote isn't anywhere near that kind of complexity (nor are most things programmers write).

[Omnifarious]

14:48 - Python does exactly this. At least, as of Python 3. There is no integer overflow in Python. The integer just gets bigger. They smoothly scale the representation under the hood. Of course, in Python, nobody is expecting anything to be blazingly fast and so that works. But I think he's right, and I also think that could be made not ridiculously expensive.

I'm going to think about making an integer type in C++ that can do this. Though, in C++ the performance degradation involved is going to concern many more people. It can probably still be made pretty efficient, and would be really helpful when dealing with data from untrusted sources.

[jaitaiwan]

As one of the maintainers of Gorilla Websockets, I feel your pain.

[maxmustermann-zxyq]

How dare you expect self explaining variables, how else will that one goated programmer make sure that no one else but him can decipher his spaghetti code?