Saturday, April 27, 2013

Go: Engineered Programming Language

A language designed to be "boring" but effective for Google.
A very informative presentation:

Go at Google: @ InfoQ
"Rob Pike explains how Google designed Go 
to address major development issues they encounter while using other languages: 
long build times, poor dependency management, lack of robustness, etc."

For example, Go programs build 40 times faster than equivalent C++ code!

The Go Programming Language course @ Pliralsight


Even curly brackets are preserved for a reason to keep it look "familiar"
The same reason is stated for JavaScript, as well as Java and C#.
This is to help developers transition from other programming languages.

But there is also a more practical engineering reason:
to avoid hard to detect semantic errors caused by changes in indentation,
observed when embedding Python language, also popular in Google, to other tools.

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