OSCON 2010: Rob Pike, "Public Static Void"
O'Reilly3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2012–2023
talk · intermediate · evergreen · 2012–2023 on HN
A 13-minute OSCON 2010 talk in which Rob Pike argues about what is wrong with mainstream languages like C++, Java and C#, and presents Go as a response. He discusses verbosity and what lightness means in a language.
HN uses it as a concise statement of the thinking behind Go's design.
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8 comments from Hacker News
> I wonder what rob pike has to say about OOP or java, I wish I could listen to it. 12 minutes where Pike talks about a few things, that seem to be wrong in our software world: ▶ this video
"Public Static Void" Rob Pike (Bell Labs, Plan 9, Google Go) gave this short speech at OSCON 2010 about what's wrong with programming languages, their thinking, and their recent direction, with a lot of focus on C++/Java/C#, and how Go was a response to that. ▶ this video Apple Swift seems to share much of the thinking, and the huge enthusiasm for Swift this week suggests developers seem to at least subconsciously recognize there is a problem.
>PHP is horribly inconsistent, breaks all the rules about programming language design, and is infuriating. Some say that rules are made to be broken. In the context of Go, Rob Pike argues exactly that in this short talk on why they made Go: ▶ this video
Reminds me of this talk: ▶ this video And the quote to go along with it: "I'm always delighted by the light touch and stillness of early programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done. Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who'd have guessed sophistication bought such noise?"
Rob Pike actually defined it exactly this way when it was introduced -- a simpler systems language, in contrast to Java. It's funny -- I actually just watched this video yesterday: ▶ this video
In Go you use the pattern of prefixing enum constants with the enum category to indicate that the enums are related to each other (e.g. StatusOk, StatusNotFound instead of status.OK, status.NotFound). Which is funny because today I came across this quote that "patterns are a demonstration of weakness in a language" in a Go talk ▶ this video . I wish enums will eventually be implemented, generics are coming after all.
I guess I'm thinking mostly about the talk Rob Pike gave called "public static void" [1], where he probably describes pretty well what "lightness" means to him, or at least what it meant to him 7 years ago. It seems largely about verbosity. [1] ▶ this video
The "Talks and Videos" page ( link ) is outdated as well. Here's my personal list: Why Learn Go? link Short interview with Rob Pike, OSCON 2012 Get Started with Go link Andrew Gerrand A Tour of Go link Russ Cox Go Concurrency Patterns link Rob Pike, Google I/O 2012 Goroutines, Channels Meet the Go Team link Panel (Pike, Thompson, Griesemer, Gerrand, Fitzpatrick, Simons), Google I/O 2012 Computing Map Tiles with Go on App Engine link Chris Broadfoot, Andrew Gerrand, Google I/O 2012 Go in Production link Gustavo Niemeyer, Google I/O 2012 Go: Code that grows with grace link (Contains some audio glitches) Andrew Gerrand Interview with Rob Pike link Rob Pike, GOTO Conference Lexical Scanning in Go link Rob Pike Cuddle, A Go AppEngine Demo link Andrew Gerrand Building Integrated Apps on Google's Cloud Platform link Andrew Gerrand, Google Developer Day Japan 2011 Real World Go link Andrew Gerrand, I/O BootCamp 2011 Go: it's that simple?! link Andrew Gerrand, OSDC 2011 Practical Go Programming link Andrew Gerrand, FOSDEM 2011 Writing Web Apps in Go link Andrew Gerrand, Rob Pike, Google I/O 2011 Go Programming link Rob Pike, Google I/O 2010 Another Go at Language Design link Rob Pike, Stanford University Public Static Void ▶ this video Rob Pike, OSCON 2010 The Go Programming Language link Rob Pike, Google Tech Talk