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The Legacy of Go

Presenter: Dave Cheney (@davecheney), Google Go team

  • How will Go be remembered? What will be the legacy of Go?
  • Start by looking at legacies of other languages:
    • C: high-level assembly language, first to take portability seriously, every major OS written in C
    • C++: object-orientation, zero-cost abstraction (if compile time is not a cost)
    • Rails: standardized project layout, compared to previous web frameworks - they differed in "belligerent" ways, now all web frameworks look similar
  • Go: a simple programming language (Dave's closing keynote at GopherConIndia 2015)
  • Language authors believed complexity must be avoided. Some wanted to add abstractions to handle complexity, others believed abstractions == complexity.
  • Go is fitness for purpose
  • Tooling: deliberate symbiosis, Russ Cox talked about need for mechanical refactoring and need for generated code to be indistinguishable from human-written code, gofmt ensures its ubiquity, almost all code is gofmt'ed and the little that isn't is viewed with suspicion
  • No language will be viewed as complete without a canonical style, and a tool to enforce it.
  • Katherine Cox-Buday's talk at GopherCon - is our profession a pop culture? "Programming is a pop culture" - Alan Kay
  • Look at role of the programmer in a wider social context
    • Tailor J.W. Davis in 1870s improved trousers for customer request, eventually became Levi's Jeans
    • Sunglasses designed to aid pilots to add eyestrain -> Ray-Ban aviators
    • 1979, Sony released Walkman, allowed everyone to be music enthusiasts
    • Languages are not immune to the whim of popular fashion.
    • A new language, to be successful, has to be sufficiently differ
    • Trends toward static typing: types go out of style but never for long, moving back to static typing, some languages are retrofitting not for perf (type inference) but for programmer productivity
    • Interfaces: refinement of C++ virtual base class, evolution of Java's interface type. Pure behavior. Like Smalltalk - objects defined not by membership, but by behavior. Refinement of many previous attempts.
    • Robert C. Martin quote: are languages successful because they offer programmers more choice, or are they successful for the opposite reason, because they offer less?
    • Inheritance** - took away something people didn't miss in the first place
    • Semicolons; - still there but hidden, (JavaScript made semicolons optional, and sometimes it works!)
    • Threads - programmers no longer have to be concerned with thread management
    • Removing theads and needing to care about the stack, and replacing with goroutines and channels, is Go's most powerful mark.
    • gofmt, interfaces, goroutines - how future programmers will look at Go's legacy
    • Fantastic language to teach the theory and practice of programming, and we've barely scratched the surface
    • More books, blog posts, user groups, conferences, diversity
    • Encourages everyone to lean in and shape how Go will be remembered