Actually there are relatively few real (TM) open source projects driven by the community, at least if you look at important projects. Many open source projects are just commercial projects driven mainly by a single company. Look for example at Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, and Elasticsearch. They follow exactly the model described in the article. Technologies like these could have been developed by a community, too, but it is hard to form such a community and keep it alive.
For a community-driven project from the size of a database some serious sponsors would be needed. Good examples are Rust, Linux, and PostgreSQL. I wonder why so many companies are happily paying Oracle (and the likes) tons of money instead of sponsoring an open source project like PostgreSQL.
Actually Mongo doesn't even look at pull requests. So, yes.
Postgres (do we really still need the "QL" reminder?) has demonstrated staying power, and repays invested time in spades. Linux, obvs. Rust, it's still too early to be sure about. Learning it will be at least educations, maybe formative, and at worst it won't be taken away.
The article uses "Google" instead of individuals names to make the actions taken seem like sinister actions of a faceless corporation.
My interpretation is that Google employs a tight-knit group of people that work on Go and collectively are the BDFLs of the language. This isn't that much different from most large OSS projects, although it does seem likely that this core team weights the opinions of those that they interact with daily (ie, other Google employees) over people they barely know.
Many like Go because it is an opinionated language. I'm not sure that a 'community' run language will create something like that because there are too many opinions. Many claim to represent the community, but not the community that doesn't share their opinion. Without clear leaders I fear technical direction and taste will be about politics which seems more uncertain/risky.
I like that there is a tight cohesive group in control over Go and that they are largely the original designers. I might be more interested in alternative government structures and Google having too much control only if those original authors all stepped down.
It can be forked it if the opinions are widely shared and you think people will support you to run it better ? The tone of the article seemed to be casting shade relative to the institution funding it's development as the foundation of why there are problems ? It's normal in a large scale open lanuage there will be disagreement around direction of the project.
Many models around how those disagreements are resolved exist across many projects. You can choose one of them or build your own project and make your own decisions :)
To their credit, the Go team withdrew most of Error Values draft 2 [1] after a great deal of negative feedback. However, they've kept one unpopular change to fmt.Errorf().
We can hope that draft 2 of Error Handling [2] won't look anything like draft 1, for reasons such as [3].
This could be done, of course. But how likely is such an approach to succeed? It would effectively create a new language and in turn to a new ecosystem. Why not just use a different language (Rust comes to mind) then?
But Go is one in a long line of proprietary languages that those of us who have been around the block know to stay away from. Recently: Java was Sun's, C# is Microsoft's, Swift is Apple's, Go is Google's. With any luck, all will be footnotes in ten years. Those of us who knew better than to get invested in them will be fine. Everyone else gets a chance to learn something.
I am about to learn a new programming language and I decided against Go just because of this fact. I do not trust Google and reading this article just makes clear how critical the state of the language is in terms of control by the community.
Python looks most promising and I already worked with it, but I am not sure yet. Can anyone recommend a viable alternative for Go? Any web-focused language that is performant, modern andalready well used?
So proprietary is bad? I have no issues with things being owned by a single entity, especially when they're financially backed by that (massive) entity.
Seeing Huawei got recently blacklisted for all US made chips, parts and some Android services from Google, an interesting question to ask is whether the US government will one day force some foreign companies (e.g. Huawei, ZTE and DJI for example) to stop using programming languages invented & implemented by US companies.
The license can change any time they want. They can change the license to prevent certain companies from using future releases and/or security patches.
Let's don't forget the fact that Huawei had legally binding contracts with all those US suppliers.
To determine how open a language really is look at how many widely used implementations of the compiler there are for the language. If there is only a single implementation of the compiler/interpreter than it is not really open but controlled by that core compiler team.
The Go language is defined by a spec with compatibility guarantees, but beyond embedded systems and WASM, there don't seem to be a lot of use cases for alternate implementations.
Most languages I can think of have one very dominant implementation and maybe another one or two that few people use. Python, Ruby, Java, C#, Go, Rust, Haskell... C/C++ are the only exception since Clang became serious competition to GCC and Visual Studio. Even Javascript only really has Chrome and Firefox.
I don't think that is necessarily true. Rust has only one compiler (and I think adding a second one would be a huge effort with no clear win) yet it is developed by a community that is very welcoming to newcomers. At least, that's been my experience.
It is definitely true. There's virtually no room for improving the underlying compiler toolchain because there's no allowance or support for an alternate implementation (using GCC, for example).
Go at least has gcc-go, which is a compliant implementation that gets some benefits from being part of GCC (like not completely broken support for dynamic link libraries!).
Having a second compiler implementation forces the language grammar and behavior to be specified in a formal manner that allows anyone to understand how it works.
I haven't thought consciously about that, but it turns out that I've been doing that kind of validation unconsciously. I didn't get interested in actally using D, for example, until the GDC variant arrived (Dlang-support in the GCC collection).
Gcc compiles Rust fine. Its borrow checker won't bark at you, but that doesn't affect code generation.
OCaml and Haskell are one-horse towns with substantial history.
But as Stroustrup says, there are languages people complain about, and languages no one uses. You generally end up better off investing your time in mastering a language people complain about. Bitterly. Once that meant FORTRAN.
For a community-driven project from the size of a database some serious sponsors would be needed. Good examples are Rust, Linux, and PostgreSQL. I wonder why so many companies are happily paying Oracle (and the likes) tons of money instead of sponsoring an open source project like PostgreSQL.
reply