zlacker

"So Rob Pike is basically saying that the developers at Google aren’t very good so they’ve developed a dumbed down language so they can get things done."

I read the Pike quote very differently. When Pike says: "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers." I thought he meant programmers today use google to assist them in programming.

>>keithb+(OP)
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers."

I took that to mean "Our programmers are building products, not thinking about building programming languages"

>>keithb+(OP)
"Googler" means "someone who works at Google". He's saying the language is designed for people who are in large, transient teams building large-scale production systems, not people who want to explore advanced programming language concepts.

>>jalfre+q
It may go even further than that. Google has to produce multi-million line programs and maintain them for a decade or two. That's not a problem that most programming language researchers face. If researchers think about that, they usually do so in the abstract, rather than from a position of personal experience.

One place this shows up: Build times. Turning a 45-minute build into a 10-second build, times 30 programmers, times several builds a day for 10 years... that adds up to a really big difference.

>>Animal+r5
It always astounds me when (inexperienced) developers play down build times as if they simply aren't that big an issue. They are hellish, creativity crushing monsters.

Also, static binaries -- so the DevOps guys don't hit you with sticks.

I still remember the first go program README.md I shipped. "Umm, get foo to box, ./foo in a way so that it runs persistently and at startup."

Easy way to get your apps to the front of the line in the deploy queue -- all the time.