Hacker News Reader

Comment by npe | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it, he's talking about select/alt (i.e. guarded commands from CSP) being a native feature of the language rather than callback-based approaches. It's possible to implement CSP channels in most languages, but they're not first-class like go.

View on HN

> It's possible to implement CSP channels in most languages, but they're not first-class like go.

But does that matter? In all my experience, I can't think of any instances where that wouldn't be a distinction without a difference. (Perhaps I'm missing something, though.)

Defaults matter because friction matters, but friction there is largely removed by having a decent package manager, so I personally don't think it matters (though the topic of "what batteries should be included" has far from run its course).

The minute you put language constructs in the base syntax and runtime of the language, it's a lot more than friction. Love it or hate it, Go is inextricably tied to CSP.

It matters a lot IMO. Most systems programming languages can implement whatever concurrency primitives you care to use, but most people default to whatever is provided by the OS/language because concurrency is hard. Having first-class syntactic sugar over a concurrent runtime bakes in a certain programming style in the language, which strongly determines how the language is used and the programming style. Go comes out of the Newsqueak/Aleph/Limbo family which has a very different style of programming compared to a lot of other languages.

I think there's a difference between 'in the standard library' and 'in the language', though. They seem to be praising Go for doing the latter. And the technical language in which it was expressed gave me to think there was some technical motivation for that, as opposed to sociological - but if what they meant is what you said, then I certainly wouldn't disagree with that.

I'd argue that Go is explicitly sociological. Most of the novel ideas in Go (process calculi/guarded commands in a concurrent language) were originally embedded in Cardelli and Pike's Squeak back in the 80s. The rest is trying to standardize the way scalable web applications are built.

It's the opposite - pointing out that X can just as well be implemented in language Y is the irrelevant point because anything can be implemented in any turing complete language.

Where languages differ is what they make easy to use, or first class.

As an example consider Go's autoformatter gofmt. It got released with the language, pushed and marketed as the way to format your code - first class. As a result, virtually all Go code is uniformly formatted. Contrast that with autoformatters in other languages pre-Go. They existed, but often multiple per language, each with hundreds of configuration options, all with minimal uptake in their ecosystems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com