dotGo 2015 - Rob Pike - Simplicity is Complicated
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN returns to it to explain why Go deliberately resists syntactic sugar and new features.
What it is
Rob Pike's dotGo 2015 talk argues that Go only seems simple, and that its simplicity hides real complexity that is part of the design. He explains the thinking behind Go's restraint in features.
Recommended by 7 HN commenters across 7 different months, 2016 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends musha68k · 2016-01 · on “Ask HN: Best (Tech) talks from 2015”
I hadn't been particularly enthusiastic about Go but in the end Rob Pike won me over - "Simplicity is Complicated": [this video] A powerful talk on Silicon Valley history by Kelsey Gilmore-Innis - "What Tech Workers Can Learn From Harry Bridges": [LINK]
Recommends donatj · 2016-07 · on “John Carmack on Inlined Code (2014)”
It's an active choice of the language to not allow many syntactic sugars that make the code have a much higher learning curve. [this video] is a good overview.
Recommends paulriddle · 2018-04 · on “Ask HN: Why is data simpler than syntax?”
To me it feels like apples to oranges comparison. I watched this talk on strangeloop a long time ago, and a version of this talk given on RailsConf recently (watched recently, not given). Here's what I see on the page: > Complex constructs: State, Object, Methods, Syntax, Inheritance, Switch/matching, Vars, Imperative loops, Actors, ORM, Conditionals. > Simple constructs: Values, Functions, Namespaces, Data, Polymorphism, Managed refs, Set functions, Queues, Declarative data manipulation, Rules, Consistency. And to dig deeper, it makes sense to search for "why state is bad", "why inheritance is harmful", "avoid conditionals", etc., and read whatever you find interesting. Go has particularly
Recommends troytchell · 2018-10 · on “Iterative Optimization on Hot Paths in Go Apps”
The creators of Go are Rob Pike and Google. I think they would know if a different GC were better and use it. I used to sometimes doubt Rob Pike too and think Go had made some mistakes. After using Go and listening to his talks (like [0]) I realized how wrong I was. There's a reason he has helped build two wildly successful programming languages.. How many have you built? Are you smarter than Google? In the end, embracing Rob Pike's brilliant decisions and taste has made my programming life so much simpler and better. I switched to Acme [1], turned off syntax highlighting on Gitub PR reviews with a userscript[2], and my life is infinitely simpler. Rob Pike has been right on so many things an
Recommends zubspace · 2019-07 · on “What's Coming in Python 3.8”
Recently the Go team decided not to add the try-keyword to the language. I'm not a Go programmer and was a bit stumped by the decision until I saw a talk of Rob Pike regarding the fundamental principle of Go to stick to simplicity first. [1] One of the takeaways is, that most languages and their features converge to a point, where each language contains all the features of the other languages. C++, Java and C# are primary examples. At the same time complexity increases. Go is different, because of the simplicity first rule. It easens the burden on the programmer and on the maintainer. I think python would definitely profit from such a mindset. [1] [this video]
Recommends hartzell · 2020-03 · on “Simple Systems Have Less Downtime”
> Go just hides the complexity from initial inspection. If you (parent, other readers) haven't seen it, Rob Pike's "Simplicity is complicated" is a good discussion of just this point. video: [this video] slides: [LINK]
Recommends yandrypozo · 2020-08 · on “New case studies about Google’s use of Go”
the key is simplicity, you're complaining about language features that allow you to write "fun" code, but remember that we spend around 80% of the time reading or debugging code, the main focus of Go is about writing code that's easy to read which will allow you to scale a project or source code with more people, also remember that easy doesn't mean simple, I think these 2 talks will make you understand my idea a little bit better: [this video] [LINK]
Cites SwellJoe · 2017-03 · on “Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)”
I've been thinking a lot lately about why Go, a quite minimalist language by modern standards, has been so incredibly successful in such a short time. It's about a decade old, and is already among the top 5 languages for people starting new OSS projects (at least in my area, which is systems management). Green field development is being done in Go at a rate unprecedented for such a new language, I think. Node/JS might be precedent if we say that Node is a whole new thing, even though it uses JS as its syntax, using it as a server language is pretty new (ignoring Netscape's failed attempts at it in the 90s). I'm tempted to compare it to PHP, which exploded in popularity despite (unarguably, I