Thank you Google!

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Go!  [WP]

[youtube=425,350]rKnDgT73v8s[/youtube]

This is so huge!!!

My jaw is on the floor!

[Cognitive Dissident]

Congratulations on your non-troll post!

Interesting it only supports real operating systems.  I like that it addresses a lot of syntactical issues along with the innovations.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

It targets the best server operating systems first, though it compiles perfectly fine under Mac OS X and Windows via Cygwin.

[Cognitive Dissident]

On the down side, no exceptions, no function overloading, and a lot of stuff other people appreciate more than I do.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Right now it's not better than a dozen other ambitious languages that tried to do similar things over the past ~15 years (the first thing that comes to mind is E, and the second is Evlan, the latter only because I knew its developer before he was hired by Google).  What's different this time is the amount of brains and capital that can be put behind this project.

It should also be noted that Google decided to release it very early, so it shouldn't be compared to the maturity of Java or C# when they were released, but rather the way those projects were incubated internally for a couple years prior.

I also like its license - BSD. 

[AL the Inconspicuous]

From Slashdot -- Go, Google's New Open Source Programming Language --

Many readers are sending in the news about Go, the new programming language Google has released as open source under a BSD license.  The official Go site characterizes the language as simple, fast, safe, concurrent, and fun.  A video illustrates just how fast compilation is: the entire language, 120K lines, compiles in under 10 sec on a laptop.  Ars Technica's writeup lays the stress on how C-like Go is in its roots, though it has plenty of modern ideas mixed in:

"For example, there is a shorthand syntax for variable assignment that supports simple type inference.  It also has anonymous function syntax that lets you use real closures.  There are some Python-like features too, including array slices and a map type with constructor syntax that looks like Python's dictionary concept.  [...]  One of the distinguishing characteristics of Go is its unusual type system.  It eschews some typical object-oriented programming concepts such as inheritance.  You can define struct types and then create methods for operating on them.  You can also define interfaces, much like you can in Java.  In Go, however, you don't manually specify which interface a class implements.  [...]  Parallelism is emphasized in Go's design.  The language introduces the concept of 'goroutines' which are executed concurrently.  [...]  The language provides a 'channel' mechanism that can be used to safely pass data in and out of goroutines."

[sillyperson]

I'm tired of new languages. Maybe I just got burned by Perl6 being vapor for too many years and Java sucking ass.

[Cognitive Dissident]

I'm tired of new languages. Maybe I just got burned by Perl6 being vapor for too many years and Java sucking ass.

C++ and Java sucking ass took a lot out of me...which, oddly, is why this looked refreshing.  Nevertheless, must have exceptions, for starters.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

I get tired of all the new vaporlangs too, but, c'mon...  it's Google!  They can do awesome stuff!  (And the BSD monolicense makes corporate kool-aid pretty darn safe.)

And they never said there won't be exceptions, etc added in the future (and I'm already playing with an "error channel" concept right now).  They're not releasing it for mass consumption yet, just "open sourcing" it so more people could provide ideas and feedback.

[sillyperson]

you can always implement exceptions yourself if the lang has closures

[Sam Gunn (since nobody got Admiral Naismith)]

I'm tired of new languages. Maybe I just got burned by Perl6 being vapor for too many years and Java sucking ass.

C++ and Java sucking ass took a lot out of me...which, oddly, is why this looked refreshing.  Nevertheless, must have exceptions, for starters.

C++ is far better than Java.  Fuck Java.

[sillyperson]

C++ is far better than Java.

Only because you can simply not use all the OOP BS and just code C as God intended

Fuck Java.

^THIS

[Sam Gunn (since nobody got Admiral Naismith)]

C++ is far better than Java.

Only because you can simply not use all the OOP BS and just code C as God intended

Fuck Java.

^THIS

Yup.  I can't think of any serious piece of software that is written in Java.  I wonder why... (not really)

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Only because you can simply not use all the OOP BS and just code C as God intended

Man I love plain C...   

Over the years, sometimes it almost felt like it would be easier to just do everything in C (with lots of great libraries of course) rather than having to know a dozen other languages / VM's / etc here and there.  Of course adding some built-in syntax sugar for regex, hashes, etc to the language would be nice too, and shouldn't hurt performance at all, but OOP is lies.

I like to go optimization-crazy sometimes, like remove the configuration overhead by making all settings compile-time.  (Yup, playing with Gentoo / BSD will do that to you.  Good times.)  That's just me fooling around, but if compilation becomes much faster, the ports / portage concept of custom-compiling every package could spread.

I can't think of any serious piece of software that is written in Java.

Java is a business language - it gets used a lot more than home users notice.  Like COBOL. 

It sucks for low level programming because it will never be as fast & powerful as C, and it sucks for scripting because there are dynamic languages built specifically with programmer productivity in mind.  It's neither town nor country - the worst of both worlds.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

The "Great Computer Language Shootout Game" included Go in its benchmarks.

Disappointing - so far...