[ts330]

Exciting? Possibly for those involved.

I hate to say this, as I'm generally optimistic towards most developments like this, but over the last decade I've become so apathetic towards anything and everything from Google. They've lost so much mindshare and credibility. Their org structure leads to stagnation left, right and centre.

I'd rather tolerate the poor status quo in React land than take any sort of bet on Google getting something "newish" right.

It wasn't always like this.

[Workaccount2]

Everyday that Sundar is still CEO leaves me more and more bewildered. I cannot figure out how Brin and Page (who together own voting majority) look at google of 2024 and say "Yup, this is what we want Google to be".

[agotterer]

The goal of a public company is to increase shareholder value. Hard to argue that Sundar hasn’t done that. Revenue has increased 5 years straight. Market cap with the exception of a dip during Covid is strong and is approaching its all time high.

As a Goolgle user and long time admirer, there have certainly been some disappointments and mistakes over the years. But there’s also been some major accomplishments which people sometimes overlook.

While still early, Waymo seems to be on the right trajectory and may be a key player in autonomous vehicles. Let’s not forget Googles work on transformers, which is heavily responsible for the current AI boom. That’s just two that come to mind, I’m sure there are others. Maybe these were started before Sundar, but he’s been CEO for almost 9 years now. So he gets credit.

Google may have some culture challenges to work through, brain drain, and identity issues. But I don’t think their story is written just yet. With a giant stock pile of cash they have plenty of time and resources to buy or figure their way out of any perceived issues (if that’s even what they need to do).

Microsoft did it. And if you really want to have your mind blown, go take a look at IBMs stock chart. I didn’t expect to see it approaching an all time high.

[twelfthnight]

What choice can you point to that has increased Google's market cap? Google's search quality is deteriorating, Waymo is yet to make a profit, GCP is struggling, "Attention is all you need" was too early on to credit Sundar, and since then Google's reputation is flagging due to embarrassing AI models...

I think Google's market cap is increase _despite_ Sundar, not because. That said, Google does have enough resources to turn it around, I just don't think Sundar is the right person to do it.

[agotterer]

GCP is struggling? Is that an opinion based on experience or based on actual stats? Because GCP revenue has increased every year since 2017. AWS and Azure are capturing more market share. But I’m not sure I consider third place and $33B in revenue last year a struggle.[1]

> I just don't think Sundar is the right person to do it

That was sort of my point. Does Google need to be turned around? All stock metrics and revenue metrics show that they are doing well as a company.

Sure the AI model stuff was embarrassing. But it doesn’t seem to be having an impact on the value of the company. Maybe goodwill was hurt. But if we’ve learned anything from the Meta drama over the years, people will be quick to forget about it. I don’t think a few fixable and public missteps like that will sink the company. Does anyone outside of tech even know about it? It’s possible it’s indicative of a larger internal issue thats brewing. But it’s not impacting the value of the company… yet at least.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/478176/google-public-clo...

[twelfthnight]

Google Cloud Platform's growth is slowing [1]. It's finally profitable, but I don't think distant third place is what Google was looking for after 10 years of pouring billions of losses into it.

At the time of this news, Google's stock fell 5 percent, so it is hurting company evaluation, at least temporarily.

Google's stock might be rising, but what is causing that? I can't point to any material success of Google in the last 10 years to explain it, seems to me Google is coasting.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-parent-alphabet-re...

[Workaccount2]

Google is in the familiar position where there numbers are good, the charts are all pretty, but when you go put your ear to the ground, you only hear sounds of trouble.

If google had proper leadership, the company would easily be worth twice it's current value. Easily. Instead we have a situation where raw capitalist inertia is carrying the company forward, while active discussions of the company are ridden with grievances and frustrations. Grievances and frustrations in a market where there are competitors that users can flee to. It's a bad spot to be in.

There is no reason Google shouldn't be the ones on the cusp of releasing GPT-5 level LLMs. None. Instead however they have a middling LLM that is scared to mention white people. So back to the drawing board so they can work out the racial kinks, while the competition blasts past them.

Google needs big company technology focused leadership 5 years ago. But tomorrow would be good too.

[agotterer]

You make a good point about the possibility that they could be even more successful with stronger leadership and product focus. I can’t argue with that and don’t disagree.

My points were focused on the fact that the data just doesn’t currently show Google failing or declining as a company.

It’s going to be really interesting to see how the Google AI strategy plays out. I agree that they could have absolutely been the leader. They had the money, resources, and ingredients to make it happen.

I believe that AI is a threat to their current business model. How much did that influence their investment and focus on it?

[lgleason]

They have essentially retired and are just enjoying the money they made from it.

[twelfthnight]

Imagine having the talent and money of Google and accomplishing essentially nothing in ten years, but collecting 200 million a year.

[kilroy123]

I agree as someone who has spent the past decade working in Angular all day and then React. And I don't love React.

[bheadmaster]

Golang is one of the Google products that I consider revolutionary in programming.

But then again, it may just be because they employed the rockstars (Rob Pike, Ken Thomson, and Robert Griesemer) to work on it.

I suppose it's less about the company, and more about who the company chooses to work on the project.

[twelfthnight]

I hear "revolutionary" claimed about languages like Rust, Haskell and Zig, but rarely about Go. What about Golang is revolutionary to you?

[bheadmaster]

There are several features that can be considered neat on their own. Most of those features are probably derived from other languages, but together they form a very powerful language that simply takes away the pain that I feel using other modern languages, such as C++, Python, Java and NodeJS.

Here are a few on top of my head:

1) CSP concepts embedded deeply into the language (goroutines/channels/select) making concurrency easy to do correctly

2) Standard Library and Go toolchain providing everything that most languages use third party libraries for (formatting, testing, benchmarking, fuzzing, HTTP, crypto, etc...)

3) Compilation into a static binary that can just be copied from machine to machine without any dependencies whatsoever (even C struggles with that on Linux, due to glibc NSS fiasco)

4) Cross-compilation by changing two environment variables

5) Minimalistic distribution system - just write `import "github.com/person/repository"` - no need for packaging, pom.xml, requirements.txt, package.json, etc.

6) Interface-based modularity (structural typing), making code reuse much easier than the usual OOP-style abstract-class based modularity (nominal typing)

7) Extremely fast compilation, which makes read-modify-run development loop as fast as with interpreted languages

[pjmlp]

1) Modula-2, Active Oberon, Erlang

2) .NET, Java, Smalltalk, Common Lisp

3) Any compiled language until the mid-1990's.

4) Amsterdam Compilers Toolkit, 1980

5) Until the repo changes, forbids distribution of binary libraries

6) Standard ML, Caml Light, OCaml, Haskell,...

7) Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MS-DOS computers running at 7 MHz, with 640KB.

[bheadmaster]

If your post is intended to be a remark on how nothing in Go is "revolutionary", please read the first paragraph of my post, and notice how there isn't a single language in your list which is in all 7 categories.

Additionally:

- Erlang does not implement CSP, it implements Actor model

- Java does NOT have all the listed features included in its default toolkit - hence the existence of Gradle, Maven and all other packaging/testing/benchmarking solutions

- The "until mid 1990's" is the keyword here - I'm talking about modern languages and I explicitly pointed that out

- ACT is not part of any language, it is an external tool that may or may not be reliable, but definitely does not have toolchain/standard library level of quality/stability guarantee.

- "Until the repo changes" - packages can disappear from any system, see leftpad incident

- "forbids distribution of binary libraries" - not true, see [0]

[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nr-TQHw_er6GOQRsF6T43GGh...

---

However, if I have misread your tone, and your post was intended to be an informative list of languages Go was inspired by, then thanks for the information. But some of it is misleading or false.

[pjmlp]

My opinion on Go's "innovation" is well known on HN, and gonuts back when I cared pre-1.0.

I could go over those points, one by one into detail, including Russ Cox point of view on disabling binary distribution, but not feeling motivated to press the further the wound.

[troupo]

> and notice how there isn't a single language in your list which is in all 7 categories.

Implementing, sometimes quite poorly, all 7 categories does not a revolution make.

Golang looked at the past 60 years of programming evolution and decided it needed almost none of it, and ignored any developments in programming languages of the past thirty years or so. This is not revolutionary. It is, at best, reactionary.

[ceving]

Topics where Go has failed:

  - No tail call optimization
  - No meta-programming

Both do exist in Scheme since 1975.

[adrianmsmith]

The way concurrency works is pretty unique amongst mainstream languages.

Java has just copied some parts of how concurrency works in Go, but that's nearly 20 years after Go was released.

It's extremely easy to start up code concurrently with "go foo()". You can start up lots of such functions concurrently, as it works in userspace. Like async code, but no "colored functions" problem.

[pjmlp]

Actually Java brought back the green threads model that it had before Go came to be.

The difference is that now red and green threads are exposed at the API level, and not an implementation detail.

Hardly copying Go.

[bzzzt]

> but that's nearly 20 years after Go was released.

Go 1.0 was released in 2012.

[neonsunset]

Quoting "colored functions" is a problem of skill. It is a tell of engineer's lack of understanding of concurrency.

[bheadmaster]

Can you please elaborate why?

[superdisk]

The concurrency model basically came from Erlang, which in my opinion does it better.

[ildjarn]

Colored functions is only a problem in JS

[bheadmaster]

And Python... And Rust... And C#...

[lokhura]

And C#, Python, Rust...

[ildjarn]

You can de-color an async function by blocking.

[kardianos]

Exactly, but the Go team appears to have the exact opposite mindset as Google product managers. They care about maintaining a product and compatibility, without major API revisions. They appear to care about first principle engineering, not "let's make a new product!".

Okay, watching this video, and they just infantized their audience "if someone makes you uncomfortable, come find a staff" as if the conference goers aren't adults. That makes me really uncomfortable that they think adults can't handle themselves and work things out.

[pjmlp]

I fail to see in what sense.

It is basically a revamp from those rockstars previous efforts (Limbo and Oberon based dialects).

[pookha]

It was mostly always like this. You might go back further, but since 2008 I've been dealing with google snake-oil. They sold a customer I worked with a "search appliance" in 2007 that was more or less a paperweight. They packaged up "commodity hardware" in a fancy yellow google case and overcharged this military unit out the ass for what was a half-assed map-reduce algorithm with no security and no means of compartmentalizing the data that was stored on the appliance. This was years before the elk-stack. I can still distinctly remember the commander - an old special forces guy - telling the google-rep that he wanted to do a Roshambo game (Cartman nut kicking contest). A year or so later I cracked open their case and saw that they'd essentially packaged up an old dell poweredge 6K series with slow magnetic drives (and raid-5 lol). Maybe that fly's if you'd chained fifteen of these things into a cluster but that's not how they sold them to their customers. Google is a dishonest company filled with immoral lechers.

[vasco]

Google was too innovative and successful to use external consultants and so the consultants joined the company as employees and did it from the inside!

[pavlov]

Google today feels like Nokia of the mid-2000s. Victim of its own massive success, taken over by internal politics and divisions. Employs lots of smart people who figured out key ideas for next-gen tech early, but the organization is unable to take any of those innovations to market. And so it’s just stuck milking its cash cow.

Google’s AI strategy is as clear as Nokia’s smartphone software strategy was.

[ta988]

They took some of the best brains, spoiled them with high salaries and glory and took their best years to make them work on dumb problems and projects that were cancelled at various stages of their life.

[adrianmsmith]

Those best brains did produce lots of interesting things, back in the day (not recently). The Google search algorithm, the ads auctioning system, Gmail, Golang, certain parts of Google Cloud like BigQuery (create relational tables, just stuff data in there, just scales by itself without "provisioning", write SQL queries including joins e.g. over hundreds of billions of rows...)

[unclebucknasty]

Don't forget Google Wave.

May 2010 - August 2010.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave