Bram Cohen: Comments on Go
bramcohen.livejournal.com
bramcohen.livejournal.com
If you're working in plenty of other languages compile time does not go up linear with code size, but much faster.
When you start out it zips right along, but as soon as you cross that 10,000 line mark the first bits of irritation set it in, and not much later than that you can go and get a cup of coffee and drink it while your code rebuilds. For really large projects an hour isn't much at all!
Fast compile time = I won't lose my train of thought while waiting for the compiler to finish. It's a 'tool' thing, and I think that such details make for much better tools.
I think his point is that Go isn't special in this regard since many languages already compile much faster than C++. For example, Delphi/Free Pascal.
EDIT: Oh, you mean is it an incremental build? No. It's a full clean build, and that 11 seconds also includes preprocessing some API header files.
And neither Delphi nor Free Pascal look like they are going to be threatening C/C++ any time soon, this new language just might.
Which is partly why Free Pascal use is still marginal - the only significant advantage is compilation speed, while lack of popularity is a major disadvantage in terms of libraries, quality of optimizing compilers, etc.
Free Pascal does have generics, but doesn't appear to have equivalent template metaprogramming. C++ that only uses templates for generics may be similarly fast-compiling.
I'd compare C to Pascal.
It's also an excellent example of product quality not being the metric by which success will be determined.
Unfortunately.
I used to primarily write Javascript and Python code, but then I moved into the world of Objective-C and compilation. I also think that compiling is a productivity and focus killer, and I think addressing this issue is a worthy goal.
I think this should be banned and cleaned up by the moderators in the same way using numbers in the titles of submissions is, and the same way that moderators removed "Ohhhh snapppp" from the Go post about the author of Go!
Invariably, Paul Bucheit, Paul Graham, Bram Cohen, Guido van Rossum, Joel Spolsky, and other famous hackers get voted to the very top of the list. If these guys are great writers and great thinkers, then their articles will speak for themselves, and they usually do (but not always).
For the few people who have never heard of Bram Cohen or Joe Hewitt (currently 1 and 2 on HN), then their names are just noise. For those who have heard of them, it just biases their judgment in both clicking and voting.
In this case, Bram's blog even carries his name... so why make his name the first two words in the headline? Do we really need to make to use this kind of name-dropping to highlight content? That sounds like the opposite of content democratization to me.
Incidentally, I agree with him w.r.t. lack of exceptions being a big barrier. Everything else is cool / live-withable.
If the article was great, then it would be disambiguated by votes!
A good title should: - Be easily identified as different from others of similar topic (mine) - Non-name-dropping (yours) - Non-editorial (by board convention)
By (2) the original title is bad and by (1) just dropping the name is no good. Is there a title that works for all three rules?
If only the number of votes would be a true measure of 'greatness', then I could stop reading HN on the 'new' page. That's where the gems come by and plenty of them are lost.
I bet if you showed 200 people the article, and told 100 of them Bram wrote it, then the 100 who knew would score the article higher. Is that a good thing?
Leave the names out, and let the content decide.
Sorry for being dense, it's early :)
> I'm arguing that the reason that it has so many votes could be because his name is in the title.
Yes, I got that, it's just that because it is also in the domain name in this case I'd expect it to be just as high right now if the name had not been in the title.
> I bet if you showed 200 people the article, and told 100 of them Bram wrote it, then the 100 who knew would score the article higher. Is that a good thing?
No, it isn't. But that would mean that you'd also have to drop the domain name from behind the title.
Personally I don't mind, it helps me to avoid some of the more overexposed sites here.
The same is true for comments... the author is included, but the username isn't given the same weight as the comment itself. And I think that's a good thing... we should keep it that way for comments and for articles.
To be fair, I also use the domain somewhat, though I use it more on Reddit to avoid sites like Alternet. The domain helps me avoid sites, but I don't think it has as much effect in helping me affirm sites.
I'm not especially interested in a random person's thoughts on Go. I may be interested in their thoughts on Go if their post happens to make it to the top of YC: this probably indicates that they have something interesting to say. And I'm also interested in their thoughts on Go if they're someone who is a recognised as an authority in the field, as is the case with Bram Cohen. Or: I might be interested if they have a history of writing good posts.
So names in titles do usually convey useful information for me. (Even if I don't recognise it, the fact that the submitter used a name is informative.)
Otherwise (like in this case) it is redundant.
When his entry is mixed in with the rest of the internet, his title has no context. Putting his name in the title provides the context.
In this case, I agree it is unnecessary and redundant because the blog already carries the author's name.
Also, I'm not familiar with the bookmarklet. Does that auto-generate the titles or something?
I'd agree but only because the name is usually redundant when the domain name is shown.