GopherCon Singapore 2019 Videos | Hacker News Reader

GopherCon Singapore 2019 Videos

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28 pointsValentineC18 comments

Every time these things appear I feel very happy because it seems that the gopher protocol has finally returned! Then I click on the link.

Every time an article about Go is posted to HN, I feel optimistic that people have finally given up making the same bad joke about a thirty years obsolete protocol that happens to share a similar name. Then I click on the comments :(

the protocol is not obsolete at all, it is just not very widely used

The thing is that its not a joke, that's truly what we think when we see these headlines. And at least for me sometimes they are about the gopher I'm interested in.

Agreed 100%.

Why not call it Go-con? Why Gophercon when it doesn’t involve Gopher?

Because the mascot of Go is a Gopher, and Go programmers are also referred to as Gophers.

> The thing is that its not a joke, that's truly what we think when we see these headlines.

I'm sorry, but this isn't believable. In the general context of technology, "Go" and "Gopher" have unambiguously referred to the programming language for a decade now.

Nah. It's also not a joke for me. It's literally my first thought.

Maybe what you say is true in social circles specific to the Go language, but it's not unambiguous outside of that.

HN often refers to technologies that more mainstream communities might refer to as obsolete, but it's not so for us. There are active Gopher servers right now, and surely a community that still uses them.

I believe there is also a rising interest in Gopher among people that believe that HTTP has become far too bloated.

From a quick search, here's a blog post from February of this year of someone that decided to also host their website via Gopher:

https://petermolnar.net/gopher/

He even mentions how he was inspired by an HN post of 3 months ago that talks about the Gopherspace:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885

Your "rising interest in Gopher (the protocol)" is a handful of enthusiasts. Maybe if you tried really hard, you could identify two dozen of them. There are over half a million Go programmers in the world.

I really don't like that attitude where everything that's not mainstream should just die. It takes effort to be outside the mainstream. It makes it worse that the reason is simply because a monopoly-sponsored language wanted to use the name for a mascot for their language. Of course a language sponsored by Google is going to be popular. As the most powerful marketing company in the world, they have the power to rub whatever they want on all our faces.

Linux was only for handfuls of enthusiasts. The *BSDs were for a handful of enthusiasts. Plan9 is still only for a handful of enthusiasts. I guess they/we should all just disappear or submit to just using Chrome on Windows and programming everything as webapps in Javascript, right?

I'm not really a user of Gopher, but I appreciate anything that helps alleviate the insane Internet monoculture that we have right now, where the Internet is becoming synonymous with the Web and where it's very likely if not done already that world laws will be written with only the Web in mind.

> I really don't like that attitude where everything that's not mainstream should just die.

I'm not being normative i.e. trying to persuade you that Gopher _should_ die, in my opinion.

I'm being descriptive i.e. describing the world in which we live where Gopher _is_ dead.

Gopher will be dead when there are no Gopher servers left online and when installing a Gopher client takes substantially more effort than any other package. Right now, Gopher clients are in official repositories. All I need to install one is:

  sudo pacman -S elinks

and all I need to visit one is:

  elinks gopher://gopher.meulie.net

> Gopher will be dead when there are no Gopher servers left online and when installing a Gopher client takes substantially more effort than any other package.

This is an impractical definition of "dead".

> I'm sorry, but this isn't believable.

The first page of your comment history is basically all about Go. I'm sure that to you "Gopher" is unambiguous, but consider that not everyone is in your bubble before you accuse others of lying.

Go is a general-purpose programming language that has been in the top 10 languages by any metric for half a decade or more. The "bubble" in which "Go" or "Gopher" refers to the programming language is technology in general, not anything more specific.

I very much disagree. Firstly, the name Google chose for its new pet language wasn't even unique, effectively stealing it from a Go! language, by my understanding. With Google's track record, such as most recently attacking email, it's not surprising that Google would do this.

In any case, Google doesn't make the rules or set the stage. Gopher isn't dead and I have a Gopher hole. It's also my first thought that perhaps I'd stumbled on an interesting article, only to find it's more drivel about Google's shitty language.

In case you're wondering, here's the page where I debut my Gopher hole and the software I wrote to implement this:

http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-03-30

> Gopher isn't dead

Any definition of "dead" which permits "Gopher isn't dead" would also permit "UUCP isn't dead", or "HTTP/1.0 isn't dead", or "Token ring isn't dead". Technically true, practically false.

YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq2Nv-Sh8EbYBYteOWx9r...

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