Go (language)

[gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org (Jerry Feldman)]

In my time I've seen many computer languages from FORTRAN II to C++ to
Python including Bliss, PL/1,Pascal, Snobol, Forth,  and others. Some
languages like Fortan live forever and probably will never go away
unless legislated out of existence.

At one time Pascal was really being pushed, but it ended up essentially
on the scrap heap. (If I recall early Windows was written in Pascal). It
just comes down to whether people will seriously adopt the language. Why
do people adopt Perl and Python and not modernized BASIC. (VBA and
Visual Basic is popular on MSFT). I'm currently learning Python, and I
think it has some very neat features.

One advantage of a Java and Python is machine independence. Once you
start introducing compilation to machine code, you have all the issues
such as supporting chip level instructions that might exist in one chip
and not the other, optimizations that work on one system but not the
other. You also need to be compliant with calling standards, linkers,
and relocations. Python and Java can define their machine environments
in their interpeter VMs. Things tend to get adopted for reasons other
than they are good. If we always adopted technically excellent products,
the worls would be much different today.=20

On 11/19/2009 02:27 PM, Brendan Kidwell wrote:
>
> Samuel Baldwin-3 wrote:
>  =20
>> http://golang.org/
>>
>> "a systems programming language; expressive, concurrent,
>> garbage-collected"
>>
>>    =20
> It'll be interesting to see if this gets wide-scale adoption. I watched=
 the
> Google Tech Talk video and the presenter made the point that (paraphras=
ing)
> "there hasn't been much development in systems languages in about 15 ye=
ars"
> ... or maybe he said 10.
>
> >From the docs and the video and I don't see Go doing anything Python a=
nd
> Ruby and Java can't do except -- and this is really important sometimes=
 --
> compile to real machine code.
>
> Are there other machine-code-compiled languages that have coroutines an=
d
> garbage collection?
>
>
> Brendan Kidwell
>
>  =20


--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
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