[johnnycerberus]

In Romania there's an old question to find the character of somebody: are you Roman or Greek? Because if you are Roman, you put practice above theory, you are a pragmatist, skeptic, if you are Greek you will put theory above practice, you are an idealist, optimist, at the expense of hardships in the material world and other potential drawbacks. Rob Pike chose Roman, otherwise it would have cost Google money to train those people and we don't know if those language features could bring any benefits for the kind of software they develop. As he said, they are not researchers working with category theory, instead they program ever-changing software for an imperfect world driven by profits, rather than academic idealism.

[cmrdporcupine]

I mean, I actually work(ed) at Google and this is nonsense for Google developers.

The most used and deployed code at Google is written in C++, not Java or Python, and while we have a sane subset of it in our style guide it is by no means dumbed down to the level that Pike seems to imply we need it to be.

Google has done fairly fine deploying C++ into production for a couple decades. I haven't found Go superior at all so far, more insulting than anything. And tedious and opinionated in all the wrong ways.

[Wonnk13]

I just replied to your other comment further up thread, but yes this is my anecdotal experience as well. You couldn't walk ten feet without tripping over C++ and Java. Never myself saw Go checked into corp.

[geodel]

Seems Go insulted you so much that you really lost sense of proportion or any reasonableness in your comments.

[cmrdporcupine]

I never had that, so we can't blame Go.

[littlestymaar]

”Pragmatism vs Idealism” is pretty much like saying “we're doing the right things and others are wrong”. No software engineer would define themself as an “idealist who don't take reality into account into their design”.

For instance, I'd consider Go being very “idealistic” since it was designed mostly from the vision of a small group of people with a clear mantra: “simplicity”. But of course, Rob Pike would never have advertised his language this way.

On the other hand, one could argue that Rust is pretty much is the “realist” camp, since it was initially designed in a very different shape from what it later became when early adopters started using it (the Servo team at Mozilla in the beginning, and then other groups: for instance the Fushia team at google at an impact on the design of the async part of the language).