Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-12 Thread Bienlein via Digitalmars-d

On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 15:54:42 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

So the videos of the Gophercon 2014 are being made available.

Rob Pike did the keynote. At the expected question about 
generics,
his answer was "There are no plans for generics. I said we're 
going to leave the language; we're done.".


Discussion ongoing on HN,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7708904

--
Paulo



When Rob Pike was asked at the end of his keynote speech whether 
Go will support generics one day the majority of the audience was 
immediately laughing. If I were into Go this would make me think.


I don't think parameterized types are necessary for a typed 
language to be "good". But in Go it would be helpful to allow 
workarounds for modelling problems. As I like the way concurrency 
is done in Go I tried several times to find programming solutions 
that can manage without violating visibility rules or having 
duplicate variables or some other compromise. But there was 
simply no way.


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-10 Thread Nick Treleaven via Digitalmars-d

On 09/05/2014 18:25, brad clawsie wrote:

The official mailing list has practically no mention of generics anymore.


I think it comes up fairly regularly, despite the ML regulars being very 
anti-generics. This was posted just 2 months ago:


https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/PI_nf78jV2k


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Dicebot via Digitalmars-d

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 21:03:06 UTC, brad clawsie wrote:

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 19:07:24 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:

No, the context around what he said is very important. Google 
isn't leaving Go development, generics are not nixed for Go 
2.0, the language will continue to see bug fixes. This is all 
very clear with context.


I see this as a good. What would you rather use - a third party 
library written against abstractions or one written against 
concrete types? I would rather use a library based on concrete 
types. My observation is that the more abstraction people 
indulge, the greater the chance I will regard one of their 
abstractions as a code smell.


Quite likely you won't be able to use that 3d party library with 
your types at all and will need runtime conversion between 
library types and your own. std.algorithm is prime example of how 
generalization improves code reuse.


And it isn't the the case that the lack of generics is 
inhibiting participation. Go's library selection is already 
very good and getting better daily. Just yesterday I needed a 
Go lz4 compression library and was able to find three distinct 
implementations. Go is not hurting for third-party libraries.


This has nothing to do with the language. Existing mainstream 
languages are so bad that people will contribute to anything that 
is backed by solid brand and has enough fuss about. I clearly 
remember seeing several articles about crazy library design that 
is forced by Go lack of generics of any sort.


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread brad clawsie via Digitalmars-d

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 19:07:24 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:

No, the context around what he said is very important. Google 
isn't leaving Go development, generics are not nixed for Go 
2.0, the language will continue to see bug fixes. This is all 
very clear with context.


I see this as a good. What would you rather use - a third party 
library written against abstractions or one written against 
concrete types? I would rather use a library based on concrete 
types. My observation is that the more abstraction people 
indulge, the greater the chance I will regard one of their 
abstractions as a code smell.


And it isn't the the case that the lack of generics is inhibiting 
participation. Go's library selection is already very good and 
getting better daily. Just yesterday I needed a Go lz4 
compression library and was able to find three distinct 
implementations. Go is not hurting for third-party libraries.


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Jesse Phillips via Digitalmars-d

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 11:38:13 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
I find this aspect much more interesting than the "get generics 
or not" one. So Rob Pike and the other guy is leaving the 
language then?


No, the context around what he said is very important. Google 
isn't leaving Go development, generics are not nixed for Go 2.0, 
the language will continue to see bug fixes. This is all very 
clear with context.


I don't expect the will look to add generics in Go 2.0 (others 
will, but not them).


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Jesse Phillips via Digitalmars-d

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 11:46:20 UTC, Chris wrote:
If not, better not to introduce them. D, at a certain point in 
time, started to be designed around templates, or with 
templates in mind. I think it was Andrei who convinced Walter 
to do that.


It wasn't Andrei, but I don't remember who Walter gave credit to.


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d

On 5/9/2014 7:18 AM, Chris wrote:

There is this conflict between textbooks and real world (hardware / software
interaction). Walter once said on this forum that when he sees textbook
examples, he says that things don't really work that way.


Found that out when implementing textbook optimization algorithms.

It's sort of like watching those miracle cleaning products on an infomercial, 
and then trying them out yourself :-)


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread brad clawsie via Digitalmars-d
Beyond being fodder for people who don't write Go but hate it for 
some reason, this seems to be an ongoing non-event. The official 
mailing list has practically no mention of generics anymore.


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Chris via Digitalmars-d

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 13:59:38 UTC, Dicebot wrote:

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:38:46 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
I had the opportunity to meet Wirth at CERN, when he and a few 
ETHZ members took part on the Oberon Day, back in 2004.


He is really great guy, but he could not understand why Oberon 
was being ignored in the industry. As he expected the desire 
for quality would drive developers to it.


From Wirth published books and known projects I have an 
impression that he is a brilliant scientist who has an 
extremely basic understanding of what engineers need. His 
languages are all about proposing academical solutions to 
practical problems.


There is this conflict between textbooks and real world (hardware 
/ software interaction). Walter once said on this forum that when 
he sees textbook examples, he says that things don't really work 
that way. Through D, I've learned a lot about that, because the 
language was designed on hindsight and with the machine in mind.


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Dicebot via Digitalmars-d

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:38:46 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
I had the opportunity to meet Wirth at CERN, when he and a few 
ETHZ members took part on the Oberon Day, back in 2004.


He is really great guy, but he could not understand why Oberon 
was being ignored in the industry. As he expected the desire 
for quality would drive developers to it.


From Wirth published books and known projects I have an 
impression that he is a brilliant scientist who has an extremely 
basic understanding of what engineers need. His languages are all 
about proposing academical solutions to practical problems.


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 11:46:20 UTC, Chris wrote:

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:38:46 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:05:59 UTC, Bienlein wrote:


Well, he had previously stated that there would be no 
breaking changes, and that if there were changes it would 
have to be called "go version 2 or something". So when 
generics were brought up he stated that there were no plans 
for generics and "I said we are going to leave the language, 
we are done" (with version 1 semantics).


Ola..


Robert Pike says in this thread 
(https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=de#!topic/golang-nuts/3fOIZ1VLn1o):


"Go has type switches, and therefore no need for the Visitor 
Pattern.". He has exactly the same mindset as Niklaus Wirth 
and Oberon never got templates. Future will tell... Would be 
a nice thing to bet a dime on whether Go will have generics 
or not. I bet not ;-).


Oberon did eventually get some basic form of templates in 
Active Oberon, but that was not under Wirth's supervision.


He actually went into the other direction by making a 
minimalist version of Oberon with Oberon-07.


I had the opportunity to meet Wirth at CERN, when he and a few 
ETHZ members took part on the Oberon Day, back in 2004.


He is really great guy, but he could not understand why Oberon 
was being ignored in the industry. As he expected the desire 
for quality would drive developers to it.


In a similar vein to Rob Pike writing the blog post why he 
thinks C++ developers don't care for Go, Niklaus Wirth wrote a 
long article about the industry lack of interest in minimalist 
languages.



The problem they fail to understand, or acknowledge, is that 
large scale architectures in simple languages usually lead to 
complex code with lots of boilerplate.


--
Paulo


With generics you mean templates, right? I started to use 
templates in D, although I wasn't convinced. But the more I use 
them the more I appreciate them. If you work with one or two 
basic types, templates don't seem to make much sense. But when 
you use the power of D, like having arrays of structs that hold 
arrays of structs etc., then templates start to make sense.


The thing is, the language has to be designed in a way that 
templates make sense and can be used throughout the language. 
If not, better not to introduce them. D, at a certain point in 
time, started to be designed around templates, or with 
templates in mind. I think it was Andrei who convinced Walter 
to do that. But in my view the language has to cater for 
templates for them to be useful. Introducing them randomly for 
the sake of having them will not work.


Agreed.

The issue being that to design a strong typed language in 2007 
without support for genericity, does not make much sense. When 
all other mainstream languages have adopted them.


Lets not forget that CLU (1975) and Ada (1980) were among the 
first ones to support it.


The initial version of C++ STL was actually based on a 
preliminary version done in Ada.


Even .NET was actually designed with generics support in mind 
(1999):


http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2011/03/15/net-c-generics-history-some-photos-from-feb-1999.aspx


--
Paulo


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Chris via Digitalmars-d

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:38:46 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:05:59 UTC, Bienlein wrote:


Well, he had previously stated that there would be no 
breaking changes, and that if there were changes it would 
have to be called "go version 2 or something". So when 
generics were brought up he stated that there were no plans 
for generics and "I said we are going to leave the language, 
we are done" (with version 1 semantics).


Ola..


Robert Pike says in this thread 
(https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=de#!topic/golang-nuts/3fOIZ1VLn1o):


"Go has type switches, and therefore no need for the Visitor 
Pattern.". He has exactly the same mindset as Niklaus Wirth 
and Oberon never got templates. Future will tell... Would be a 
nice thing to bet a dime on whether Go will have generics or 
not. I bet not ;-).


Oberon did eventually get some basic form of templates in 
Active Oberon, but that was not under Wirth's supervision.


He actually went into the other direction by making a 
minimalist version of Oberon with Oberon-07.


I had the opportunity to meet Wirth at CERN, when he and a few 
ETHZ members took part on the Oberon Day, back in 2004.


He is really great guy, but he could not understand why Oberon 
was being ignored in the industry. As he expected the desire 
for quality would drive developers to it.


In a similar vein to Rob Pike writing the blog post why he 
thinks C++ developers don't care for Go, Niklaus Wirth wrote a 
long article about the industry lack of interest in minimalist 
languages.



The problem they fail to understand, or acknowledge, is that 
large scale architectures in simple languages usually lead to 
complex code with lots of boilerplate.


--
Paulo


With generics you mean templates, right? I started to use 
templates in D, although I wasn't convinced. But the more I use 
them the more I appreciate them. If you work with one or two 
basic types, templates don't seem to make much sense. But when 
you use the power of D, like having arrays of structs that hold 
arrays of structs etc., then templates start to make sense.


The thing is, the language has to be designed in a way that 
templates make sense and can be used throughout the language. If 
not, better not to introduce them. D, at a certain point in time, 
started to be designed around templates, or with templates in 
mind. I think it was Andrei who convinced Walter to do that. But 
in my view the language has to cater for templates for them to be 
useful. Introducing them randomly for the sake of having them 
will not work.


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Bruno Medeiros via Digitalmars-d

On 08/05/2014 22:09, Bienlein wrote:

On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 15:54:42 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

So the videos of the Gophercon 2014 are being made available.

Rob Pike did the keynote. At the expected question about generics,
his answer was "There are no plans for generics. I said we're going to
leave the language; we're done.".

Discussion ongoing on HN,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7708904

--
Paulo


I agree with Paulo. At 54:40 he says what Paulo has already quoted. And
"we are done" means "that's it, folks". It even sounds to me like the
language is finished and it will be left like that.

-- Bienlein


I find this aspect much more interesting than the "get generics or not" 
one. So Rob Pike and the other guy is leaving the language then?
I wonder what that means for the future of Go. I guess the community 
will take over, but will there be someone from Google still in charge? 
And how many resources/manpower from Google will they still dedicate to Go?


The thing about generics is that, if Go where to break through and 
become a mainstream popular language, generics would likely be added to 
it somehow. Maybe in the main language, as in Go 2.0, or maybe as 
side-project/language-extension (Go++ ?) that someone else would take. 
Similar to Java which tried to keep the language as simple as possible 
in the beginning (no operator overload, no metaprogramming or generics, 
etc), but eventually saw the shortcoming as too significant.. (even if 
the only thing they added was type-parameterization generics, but even 
just that makes a big difference)


--
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:05:59 UTC, Bienlein wrote:


Well, he had previously stated that there would be no breaking 
changes, and that if there were changes it would have to be 
called "go version 2 or something". So when generics were 
brought up he stated that there were no plans for generics and 
"I said we are going to leave the language, we are done" (with 
version 1 semantics).


Ola..


Robert Pike says in this thread 
(https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=de#!topic/golang-nuts/3fOIZ1VLn1o):


"Go has type switches, and therefore no need for the Visitor 
Pattern.". He has exactly the same mindset as Niklaus Wirth and 
Oberon never got templates. Future will tell... Would be a nice 
thing to bet a dime on whether Go will have generics or not. I 
bet not ;-).


Oberon did eventually get some basic form of templates in Active 
Oberon, but that was not under Wirth's supervision.


He actually went into the other direction by making a minimalist 
version of Oberon with Oberon-07.


I had the opportunity to meet Wirth at CERN, when he and a few 
ETHZ members took part on the Oberon Day, back in 2004.


He is really great guy, but he could not understand why Oberon 
was being ignored in the industry. As he expected the desire for 
quality would drive developers to it.


In a similar vein to Rob Pike writing the blog post why he thinks 
C++ developers don't care for Go, Niklaus Wirth wrote a long 
article about the industry lack of interest in minimalist 
languages.



The problem they fail to understand, or acknowledge, is that 
large scale architectures in simple languages usually lead to 
complex code with lots of boilerplate.


--
Paulo


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-09 Thread Bienlein via Digitalmars-d


Well, he had previously stated that there would be no breaking 
changes, and that if there were changes it would have to be 
called "go version 2 or something". So when generics were 
brought up he stated that there were no plans for generics and 
"I said we are going to leave the language, we are done" (with 
version 1 semantics).


Ola..


Robert Pike says in this thread 
(https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=de#!topic/golang-nuts/3fOIZ1VLn1o):


"Go has type switches, and therefore no need for the Visitor 
Pattern.". He has exactly the same mindset as Niklaus Wirth and 
Oberon never got templates. Future will tell... Would be a nice 
thing to bet a dime on whether Go will have generics or not. I 
bet not ;-).




Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-08 Thread Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d
On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 05:22:36 UTC, Russel Winder via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Thu, 2014-05-08 at 19:37 +, Jesse Phillips via 
Digitalmars-d

wrote:
[…]
Ah, well context around it removes all my claims. It is clear 
he is saying that Go 1.x will not have generics.


Given the statements about backward compatibility there is no 
way Go 1.x
can have generics. I'm fairly sure the core Go team are 
convinced the
interface way and manual "overloading" is the way to go, and 
that
generics are an unnecessary burden. Many people argue they are 
wrong

without actually trying the style of programming inherent in the
language.


You mean programming in

- Turbo Pascal with object as root
- Oberon with object as root
- Smalltalk with object as root
- Modula-3 with ROOTANY as root
- C++ without templates
- Java with object as root
- C# with object as root

Me, I know what it means.

--
Paulo



Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-08 Thread Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d
On Thu, 2014-05-08 at 19:37 +, Jesse Phillips via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
[…]
> Ah, well context around it removes all my claims. It is clear he 
> is saying that Go 1.x will not have generics.

Given the statements about backward compatibility there is no way Go 1.x
can have generics. I'm fairly sure the core Go team are convinced the
interface way and manual "overloading" is the way to go, and that
generics are an unnecessary burden. Many people argue they are wrong
without actually trying the style of programming inherent in the
language.

-- 
Russel.
=
Dr Russel Winder  t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.win...@ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Roadm: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: rus...@winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder



Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-08 Thread via Digitalmars-d

On Thursday, 8 May 2014 at 21:09:38 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
I agree with Paulo. At 54:40 he says what Paulo has already 
quoted. And "we are done" means "that's it, folks". It even 
sounds to me like the language is finished and it will be left 
like that.


Well, he had previously stated that there would be no breaking 
changes, and that if there were changes it would have to be 
called "go version 2 or something". So when generics were brought 
up he stated that there were no plans for generics and "I said we 
are going to leave the language, we are done" (with version 1 
semantics).


Ola..


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-08 Thread Bienlein via Digitalmars-d

On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 15:54:42 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

So the videos of the Gophercon 2014 are being made available.

Rob Pike did the keynote. At the expected question about 
generics,
his answer was "There are no plans for generics. I said we're 
going to leave the language; we're done.".


Discussion ongoing on HN,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7708904

--
Paulo


I agree with Paulo. At 54:40 he says what Paulo has already 
quoted. And "we are done" means "that's it, folks". It even 
sounds to me like the language is finished and it will be left 
like that.


-- Bienlein


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-08 Thread Jesse Phillips via Digitalmars-d

On Thursday, 8 May 2014 at 18:29:45 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
This statement doesn't sound like the "no generics" is the 
important part. It seems more like they have no plans to make 
Go 2.0, at least not with it bringing big breaking changes as 
people keep pointing out will happen.


But that is probably reading too much into it, I can't imagine 
he wanted to put that much information in the statement. But 
then again I haven't seen any official word on Go 2.0 (similar 
to D3).


Ah, well context around it removes all my claims. It is clear he 
is saying that Go 1.x will not have generics.


Re: [OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-08 Thread Jesse Phillips via Digitalmars-d

On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 15:54:42 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

So the videos of the Gophercon 2014 are being made available.

Rob Pike did the keynote. At the expected question about 
generics,
his answer was "There are no plans for generics. I said we're 
going to leave the language; we're done.".


Discussion ongoing on HN,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7708904

--
Paulo


This statement doesn't sound like the "no generics" is the 
important part. It seems more like they have no plans to make Go 
2.0, at least not with it bringing big breaking changes as people 
keep pointing out will happen.


But that is probably reading too much into it, I can't imagine he 
wanted to put that much information in the statement. But then 
again I haven't seen any official word on Go 2.0 (similar to D3).


[OT] Go officially won't get generics

2014-05-07 Thread Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d

So the videos of the Gophercon 2014 are being made available.

Rob Pike did the keynote. At the expected question about generics,
his answer was "There are no plans for generics. I said we're going to 
leave the language; we're done.".


Discussion ongoing on HN,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7708904

--
Paulo