A while back, it seemed that type-driven object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java had taken over. They still dominate education. Yet the last few years have seen a number of different languages reach prominence, often of very different styles: Python, Ruby, Scala, Erlang, Haskell, Lua, and many more. Surely there are enough languages. Yet new ones keep appearing. Why? And why now? In this talk I will suggest some possible reasons and why they led us to define yet another language, Go.
Rob Pike is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, Inc. He works on distributed systems, data mining, programming languages, and software development tools. Before Google, Rob was a member of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that developed Unix. While there, he worked on computer graphics, user interfaces, languages, concurrent programming, and distributed systems. He was an architect of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and is the co-author with Brian Kernighan of The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. Other details of his life appear on line but vary in veracity.
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Comments
I was looking forward at attending at this talk, and I’m still befuzzled that it wasn’t held at one of the bigger ballrooms. Certainly O’Reilly could’ve forseen that Rob would attract some attention. Now only 40 people got to see it in real sweaty conditions.
I wasn’t excited about “yet another new language” when originally looking at session abstracts, but 5 minutes into Rob’s keynote this became a must-see session. Really, really interesting stuff, maybe this is the way forward I’ve hoped for in languages that blends the value of static typing with the clean notation and simplicity that I love in dynamically typed languages. Very cool.