| The language was designed by an expert on Wirth-style languages plus the two inventors of C. They wanted to create minimal, useful language based on old techniques with only features they could all agree on. Pike used Oberon-2 back in the day, knowing its advantages. The C inventors naturally wanted it more like C. The result is a merger of these. The concurrency stuff was an exception that came from Limbo language Pike worked on. The Wirth languages were categorized by a focus on absolute simplicity and safety with just enough complexity to make building large programs easier. They constantly added or removed features in various language revisions in a search of balance. His main metric was compile time: anything that took too long was kicked out. The result was these languages were easy to learn, compiled fast (100kloc a sec on good machine), rarely crashed, and ran reasonable speed. They had GC's but also allowed manual management. They were objectively better than C language because people could produce correct programs more quickly with same effort put in due to design. http://www.projectoberon.com/ Modula-3, designed at DEC, was probably the best of that line given it's like a safer, simpler C++ with a subset closer to C. Here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3 Used in SPIN operating system that let you live-load code into the kernel for acceleration safely due to type-safe linking on top of memory-safe interfaces. Quite a few commercial deployments. Didn't take off since C was too popular & programmers only went with C-like alternatives. Lots of vulnerabilities and crashes happened. Another alternative was Delphi, which succeeded for a while. Way more productive and crash-resilient than using VC++. It fell away due to C/C++ popularity but Free Pascal community still maintains a variant of it. Their compiler targets a ton of platforms which was common for Pascal. http://www.freepascal.org/ |
Did Dennis Ritchie have a hand in creating Go? I must have missed that.
While Ken Thompson's earlier B language no doubt had an influence on C, Dennis Ritchie is widely regarded as the creator of C, which is really rather different from B, borrowing more heavily from BCPL and Algol-68. As an early (and heavy) user of C (perhaps the earliest, besides Ritchie himself), I'm willing to concede that he had enough input on C's design to be called a co-designer or co-creator. But which other "inventor of C" played a role in the creation of Go?
I also find it hard to label Rob Pike as an expert in any kind of language design. An expert in windowing systems and concurrency, perhaps, but language design? Hell, no. Even his earlier design, Newsqueak, was more of an experiment in concurrency than in language design—and it notably was a collaboration with Luca Cardelli, an expert in ML and OOP who also worked on Modula-3, and whose influence can be seen in Modula-3's several very ML-like constructs. Articles like this one[1] by Pike only serve to reinforce my thoughts that he, though a rather smart guy otherwise, is really rather ignorant about language design and about the role of types in programming in general.
> The Wirth languages ... had GC's but also allowed manual management.
None of Wirth's languages had GC until Oberon, as far as I'm aware. And spiritual successors by other groups, like Object Pascal and Ada, never really picked up on GC, either (Ada had GC as an optional part of the standard, but was removed in the latest standard because it was so rarely provided by implementations). As far as I can tell, Modula-3 is the only other "Wirth-style" language to provide GC.
Modula-3 was indeed a great language, and I think it's a real shame that it didn't get picked up more widely. At a time, it had several really solid implementations, and the language's definition is very short while still providing a plethora of useful features for programmers. The silver lining is that it was, at least, a very influential language, despite its limited adoption.
Oberon, on the other hand, was a very spartan language that offered little in terms of features, and it exhibited that Wirth really didn't grok OOP at the time he designed it (which, if I recall correctly, is something he later admitted, though I'm having trouble finding a citation at the moment). Some of Oberon's issues were fixed in later versions of the language, but some of its issues were also "doubled down" in later versions, as well.
> Another alternative was Delphi, which succeeded for a while. Way more productive and crash-resilient than using VC++.
Delphi was indeed a real alternative for a while, and while you're right that it was more productive than VC++, that's not saying much. Later versions of Delphi grew to C++ levels of size, complexity, and hairiness, and that's reflected in Free Pascal's implementation, as well. It's something that I've lamented on more than one occasion because I remember how great it was and feel as though it could still be great with a bit of streamlining.
[1]: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...