On Friday, December 1, 2017 at 4:45:39 PM UTC-7, matthe...@gmail.com wrote: > > Hugh, > > Go is a general purpose programming language that is open source and > permissively licensed, and there is no obvious reason for Google or other > contributors to change this. I strongly recommend it for your project, > although Clownfish is a robust existing project. Maybe I’ll have a mature > open-source licensed Go chess engine to share in the future, but that won’t > be for a few years. But please do consider using Go, it fixes many general > programming problems that apply to any language and compiles to many > platforms. >
Clownfish? What is that? You mentioned Stockfish previously. A chess program written from scratch is somewhat beyond my abilities. I do know how the alpha-beta algorithm works because I have a book on it that I bought in the 1980s --- that is not the same as being able to wrote a strong chess program. I actually delved into this a little bit at one time, when I was interested in Chinese Chess (also called Xiang Qi, not to be confused with Wei Qi) --- writing a chess program is a lot more difficult than you might suppose! My Elphaba Chess is just a minor variation from International Chess --- not like Chinese Chess that is a distant cousin of International Chess, at best --- I would expect that a minor modification of an existing International Chess program should work pretty well for Elphaba Chess. A chess program written in Go would be interesting though --- for one thing, the alpha-beta algorithm lends itself well to parallel-processing --- parallel-processing seems to be Go's strong suit. While I recommend Go as a general purpose language (an improved C) I also > think that convincing management of a commercial company that this > relatively young language will always have support will be a tough battle, > and more groups of people need to commit to contribution for the language > to grow past this barrier. I apologize if my assumptions are incorrect, but > my understanding is that Go would not exist if Google did not pay for it > initially, and if Google removed support (such as by privatizing Go 2) the > public would have a compiler and specification that while great are not yet > as mature as C++ or Python and would no longer have daily support and does > not have a clear organization or set of organizations to inherit it. > > My assumption is that Google management will look out for the company's > best interests even if that means going against what its employees want, > that Google has the capability to own the language on their own, and that > the critical path of Go is primarily developed today by and for Google. > Open source does not mean perpetually supported and updated in reasonable > time for commercial use, although Go seems to have support available for an > indefinite future. > AFAIK, Go is not tied to Google's server-side code development, although was invented for that purpose. It is available for general-purpose programming. I doubt that Google would pull the rug out from under all the Go programmers, as that would be a public-relations nightmare. Most likely they would just abandon ownership of Go and put it in the public-domain so that anybody could fork it. This might actually be a good thing. In the Forth world, we had the ANS-Forth Standard in 1994. This was just a marketing gimmick from Forth Inc. intended to convince the world that Forth Inc. sets the standard for Forth and all Forth programmers are totally dependent upon Forth Inc. for leadership. >From a technical standpoint, ANS-Forth was a failure in every possible way. This was a truly awful design --- obviously written by sales-people --- totally uninformed by computer-science (the sales-people don't know what reentrancy is, for example, as they use global variables for passing data between functions). Having a corporation possess 100% control over a language can be a problem. Sales-people get put in charge, and the whole thing spirals down into idiocy. AFAIK, this hasn't happened with Go yet --- Google has programmers in charge of the language --- this could change, as programmers cost money whereas sales-people work for free. If Google pulls their programmers from the Go project and put sales-people in charge instead, it would be best for all the independent Go programmers to just fork their own version and forget about Google. The worst-case scenario is that sales-people design a version of Go that is worthless, then push this through ANSI so they can declare their "ANS-Go" to be the Standard (with a capital 'S') and declare everybody else to be non-standard wanna-bees --- that is what happened with ANS-Forth. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
