Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

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SQL isn't, and if it's not a serious language, what is? Perl and PHP are what the web app layer was originally built on, and they seem to be designed to maximize developer efficiency for small projects.

Haskell is definitely interesting. If I wanted to build a large system that was super-performant, I'd look at C, Haskell, and Go. I don't know enough to make a great decision, but all three look good.

Go has the advantage of being designed for the kind of thing Google does - massive concurrency. It's also like C, which make it easier to find good programmers who are confortable with it. Actually, you'd be hard pressed to find good programmers who are uncomfortable with a language that's nearly C. I'm not saying Haskell programmers aren't good programmers, but Google probably doesn't have enough of them, and they'd have to port their existing code to a completely different base (bad idea).

The original article complains about Go's GC. For a single process application, this could be murder. I don't think Google uses a single process.

SQL isn't, and if it's not a serious language, what is? Perl and PHP are what the web app layer was originally built on, and they seem to be designed to maximize developer efficiency for small projects.

I intentionally said most, since, obviously there are serious domain-specific languages. But stating that Go is designed for large code bases, creates a false dichotomy.

Go has the advantage of being designed for the kind of thing Google does - massive concurrency.

So, claims the C fan since there's GCD, so claims the Erlang/Scala fan since it has actors, so claims the Haskell fan since it has green threads, STM, and purity.

Also, is Google interested in massive concurrency or parallelism?

It's also like C, which make it easier to find good programmers who are confortable with it. Actually, you'd be hard pressed to find good programmers who are uncomfortable with a language that's nearly C.

That's a good point. But as a result it provides only a marginally better type system, at the cost of performance compared to C. Why not make it a lot better than C, with the same performance?

Calling Perl domain specific? I think those would be considered fighting words in some places. ;)

I love a certain subset of Perl with a passion bordering on mania. While I wouldn't call it domain specific, I do think it's better defined by the domains it's not well suited for. I wouldn't use Perl for GUI programming for example.

It's kind of a domain anti-specific.

> I wouldn't use Perl for GUI programming for example.

I would. I used the gtk-perl bindings for a project and I thought they were very well done. Previously I had only used the C bindings and taking the step to a higher level language (and more importantly, one with closures) was a very nice step. It was a much better experience than doing Cocoa with Objective-C, IMO, but that could have also been related to the specific (smallish) project I was doing.

> That's a good point. But as a result it provides only a marginally better type system, at the cost of performance compared to C. Why not make it a lot better than C, with the same performance?

For many things, GC is a huge productivity boost. I've heard good things about C99, C will probably evolve into a language with a better type system anyway. I don't use C myself, but I don't see why there couldn't be a flag to ensure code only uses a saner subset of the type system.

I also don't plan to learn Go, but if I have to because it becomes the de-facto standard for some important niche, then I will. This depends massively on the quality of their implementation and also on that of their competition.

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