Comment by Kranar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kranar | Hacker News Reader

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I can't substantiate your claim about Erlang or weird syntax, is that either a proper quote or some kind of paraphrasing because nothing remotely close to it comes up.

There are numerous interviews with Rob Pike about the design of Go from when Go was still being developed, and Erlang doesn't come up in anything that I can find other than this interview from 2010 where someone asks Rob Pike a question involving Erlang and Rob replies by saying he thinks the two languages have a different approach to are fairly different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo

It's at the 32 minute mark, but once again this is in response to someone asking a question.

Here are other interviews about Go, and once again in almost every interview I'd say Rob kind of insinuates he was motivated by a dislike of using C++ within Google to write highly parallel services, but not once is Erlang ever mentioned:

https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1623555

https://www.infoq.com/interviews/pike-google-go

https://go.dev/blog/waza-talk

The parent comment does not say that Go derives from Erlang, but that both Erlang and Go implement CSP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...), with the advantage for Go over Erlang that its syntax is more familiar to programmers who know C.

Erlang does not implement CSP, and if you review the very Wikipedia link you presented it should be clear. Erlang implements the Actor model, which is more flexible for distributed, fault-tolerant systems, but lacks CSP's strict formalism and synchronization semantics. The very Wikipedia article you linked to has an entire section on how CSP differs from the Actor model. Similarly Go also does not implement CSP either, although it certainly is influenced by it.

The point of my comment is that to say that Go is basically Erlang style CSP without the weird syntax is not justified as an actual quote nor as a paraphrasing or summary of anything that anyone involved in the design or promotion of Go has ever said. It's best to reserve quotes for situations where someone actually said something or as a way to summarize something for which there are ample references available.

One should not use quotes as a way to present mostly original claims that are presented as if it's some kind of already well established knowledge.

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