“Go’s design is a disservice to intelligent programmers”

"So Rob Pike is basically saying that the developers at Google aren’t very good so they’ve developed a dumbed down language so they can get things done."

I read the Pike quote very differently. When Pike says: "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers." I thought he meant programmers today use google to assist them in programming.

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers."

I took that to mean "Our programmers are building products, not thinking about building programming languages"

"Googler" means "someone who works at Google". He's saying the language is designed for people who are in large, transient teams building large-scale production systems, not people who want to explore advanced programming language concepts.

It may go even further than that. Google has to produce multi-million line programs and maintain them for a decade or two. That's not a problem that most programming language researchers face. If researchers think about that, they usually do so in the abstract, rather than from a position of personal experience.

One place this shows up: Build times. Turning a 45-minute build into a 10-second build, times 30 programmers, times several builds a day for 10 years... that adds up to a really big difference.

It always astounds me when (inexperienced) developers play down build times as if they simply aren't that big an issue. They are hellish, creativity crushing monsters.

Also, static binaries -- so the DevOps guys don't hit you with sticks.

I still remember the first go program README.md I shipped. "Umm, get foo to box, ./foo in a way so that it runs persistently and at startup."

Easy way to get your apps to the front of the line in the deploy queue -- all the time.