Mixed reactions greet Google's Go

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 12 Nov 2009 at 16:26

Google's new programming language – dubbed Go – has met with mixed reactions from the developer community.

The open-source Go is a compiled concurrent language that experts say is a blend of Python and C++ and could to be employed to run infrastructure, backends and servers.

But it has already come under fire from developer Francis McCabe, who has asked Google to change the name because he has already written a programming language with the same name.

“I have been working on a programming language, also called Go, for the last 10 years. There have been papers published on this and I have a book,” says McCabe. “My language is called Go! The book is called Let's Go! The issue is not whether or not Google's Go will be well known. It is one of fairness.”

Other developers and commentators have been busier looking under the hood of the language to see how it might fair in an already competitive programming world.

“I've looked into the code and see a significant advance in language design,” says Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. “It's one that adroitly addresses a complex mix of requirements and trade-offs to reach the objective of a high-performance, high-productivity development tool for concurrent systems programming.

“However, anyone introducing a new language must face a vast number of competitors for developer mind-share: niche languages that percolate under the surface of the mainstream, a mainstream that includes not just Java and C#, but Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby. These are all well-established, visible alternatives.”

Programmers working with the language have also expressed mixed feelings, although the general reaction from people who have been hands with code is positive.

“I think that there are many fantastic things about it,” Mark Chu-Carroll a computer scientist who works for Google as a software engineer. “I also think that there are some really dreadful things about it.

“It's vaguely C-like, but with a lot of clean-ups and simplifications,” he writes in his blog. “Functions in Go are amazing. They start off really simply, but by providing a few simple extensions, they let you do all sorts of things and the whole thing complies really quickly.”

However, Chu-Carroll – who brands Go coding as “ugly and ad-hoc” - is highly critical of weaknesses in error handling and the fact that the language doesn't allow programmers to use many of their favourite short cuts.