[pjmlp]

Go is designed for armies of simple minded developers, Java 1.0 revisited.

“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”

-- Rob Pike

From https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fr...

[sethammons]

Simple minded is your words, not his (in another talk, I think he refers to these people as regular developers).

The harsh language there is not being "capable of understanding a brilliant language." I'm not aware of what was meant by a brilliant language, but I have to assume that it means research languages. I would not expect fresh grads to build production worthy code in any language, but especially not in a research languages (which typically are relegated to the realm of research because they are not capable of being used by large teams for the making of good software).

I'm in the business of creating value with good software, not ivory tower building that only a smaller proportion of software artisans can build and maintain.

[pjmlp]

Maybe simple minded is not the right way to put it, however from other talks even modern Java is considered too feature rich for such target group.

[dagw]

Go is designed for armies of simple minded developers,

And that's a bad thing?

[pjmlp]

Not for companies of Google size wanting to reduce hiring and ongoing project costs.

[lizmat]

Simple minded developers are cheap. And in time, easily replaceable by moderately intelligent AI.

[sethammons]

The crowing achievements of AI that interact with people are Alexa et al. Alexa can't even tell me what the newest releases are for movies.

When we can talk to an AI and describe something novel and it can interpret that, then I'll start to worry about software development jobs being lost to AI.

[pjmlp]

What about being lost to low wages countries, with better wage countries keeping the roles of project management and architecture?

[sethammons]

Didn't that scare happen a while ago with everyone worried about India taking all the software jobs? Didn't really happen. Could happen again, sure. I don't think more advanced AI or more simple programming languages will be a large factor in that.

[pjmlp]

I can tell you that the trend to offshore is still pretty ongoing in full speed.

Naturally those developers are also entitled to have jobs, the question is how it is actually done in practice.

Sadly a large majority are sweetshops.