OSCON 2010: Rob Pike, "Public Static Void"
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as a concise statement of the thinking behind Go's design.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2012 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends james4k · 2012-11 · on “Go is PHP for the Backend”
>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]
Recommends dottrap · 2014-06 · on “Why is there so much hate for .NET?”
"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.
Recommends mtrn · 2015-06 · on “The Unix Philosophy”
> 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]
Cites mseepgood · 2012-09 · on “Will Go be the new go-to programming language?”
The "Talks and Videos" page ( [LINK] ) is outdated as well.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 L
Cites andrewstuart2 · 2017-08 · on “Context should go away for Go 2”
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]
Cites bokwoon · 2020-07 · on “Go is boring, and that’s fantastic”
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.
Cites mustache_kimono · 2022-02 · on ““Sustainability with Rust” post misleading about Go”
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]
Cites Yasuraka · 2023-07 · on “Austral Programming Language”
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?"