Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lmm 3344 days ago
> If someone says they are building a race car, you have a pretty good idea that they are building a vehicle to compete in a race, and speed and handling are important, but specific details might change depending on the type of racing.

Right, but there's nothing like that for a "system programming language". What does that tell me? I might assume it meant manual memory management or a language suitable for writing a kernel, but the Go people call that a "system programming language" even though neither of those things applies.
2 comments
kbenson 3344 days ago
Embedded programming, kernel programming, high-performance computing. I view all of these as variations on systems programming.

> What does that tell me? I might assume it meant manual memory management or a language suitable for writing a kernel, but the Go people call that a "system programming language" even though neither of those things applies.

I'm not sure picking one relatively odd member of a category and concluding that since it doesn't match in some aspects that the category doesn't exist is useful. To stay with the theme, you might encounter 24 Hours of LeMons[1] at some point, and I don't think that makes the idea of race cars invalid or useless (there's a reason I said a 70's Pinto might be acceptable).

You can do some systems programming with garbage collected languages, or even dynamic languages in a pinch. It's not ideal in the vast majority of cases, but there are certain situations where it's not entirely unacceptable either (running the webserver in the same language as your dynamic site is implemented in is one).

1: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/19/how-an-amateur-launched-a-mil...

link
lmm 3344 days ago
> I'm not sure picking one relatively odd member of a category and concluding that since it doesn't match in some aspects that the category doesn't exist is useful. To stay with the theme, you might encounter 24 Hours of LeMons[1] at some point, and I don't think that makes the idea of race cars invalid or useless (there's a reason I said a 70's Pinto might be acceptable).

Is Go an odd example then? What's a typical example? Better, out of the 10 or 20 most popular programming languages, which are "systems languages" and which are not? I genuinely don't know how to tell, other than maybe "no GC". As far as I can tell the term mainly just means "language I like".

link
kbenson 3344 days ago
In the current context of contemporary languages I would consider system languages, having GC definitely defines one as abnormal, and Go is abnormal for a systems language. It was apparently much less uncommon to have GC system languages in the past (but I suspect those languages were well adapted to having fine grain memory control coupled with GC). Go is an interesting mix of low-level and close-to-the-metal with a few aspects which are not low-level (channels and GC).
link
vertex-four 3344 days ago
I've always argued that Go is wrong for calling itself a systems programming language. Unfortunately, entities with enough clout can single-handedly redefine language that has specific meaning to a minority of people, but where most people have no need for that language.
link
infogulch 3344 days ago
I wouldn't disagree with this. But the golang.org website doesn't mention "system" on the homepage, or documents page. You have to go all the way to reading the spec to see the first (and only) mention of Go describing itself as:

> a general-purpose language designed with systems programming in mind

And I'm not sure this definition is actually unrepresentative.

Contrast this with rust-lang.org where "system" is the fourth word on the homepage. People like to blame Go for people being confused about what "systems language" means, but it seems to me like this is just poor branding on Rust's part.

link
dbaupp 3344 days ago
Go rolled back a lot of their use of the systems programming label, E.g. the first version of the website http://web.archive.org/web/20091111073232/Http://golang.org has it in the heading.
link
infogulch 3344 days ago
Sure, but before even the release of Go 1.0 [1] (which also doesn't mention "system") it's gone. Surely you wouldn't attribute the entire confusion around what a systems language is to a version of a pre-release language's website that made that statement for less than a year [2], almost seven years ago.

I don't want to think about the mental gymnastics it would take to come to that conclusion.

[1]: https://blog.golang.org/go-version-1-is-released

[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20101001012723/http://golang.org/

link
vertex-four 3344 days ago
When Go was announced, the creators made a huge deal around it being a "systems programming language", which many of its users - who have never had a reason to need a systems programming language, and so have no idea what one is - have parroted ever since. Just because they no longer have it on (most of) their site doesn't mean it didn't become a buzzword within the language's community.
link