Ask HN: Why is Google in love with purposely-impaired languages like Go, Dart?

37 points

7 years ago

Google seems to invest a lot in R&D for programming languages and tooling (probably only surpassed by Microsoft, and percentually by dev-tooling-focused companies like Jetbrains), yet nevertheless, all they seem to produce seems to be "mediocre by design" in a way, or at least designed to be restrictive and/or to impair developer flexibility and productivity.

On the languages side Go and Dart seem like the epitome of "Blub languages" in PG's essay lingo. Even modern Java seems flexible and featurefull in comparison with them. Compared to Go, Rust looks like Common Lisp looked like to a Java programmer of old. Compared to Dart, Kotlin and Swift look like Smalltalk probably looked to a 90's C++ programmer...

Where is this attitude coming from? Is Google's philosophy that most programmers, including their own, are either stupid and/or irresponsible and shouldn't be trusted with powerful tools that can increase their productivity when used right? I mean, software is their business, they're not churning ecommerce infrastructure CRUDhorrhea... they should be capable of leveraging powerful programming language features to massively increase developer productivity, right?

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