Take note, spoiled software engineers: take a lesson from Google’s programming language

Lots of today programmers – excuse me, software engineers– consider themselves ‘creatives’. Sort of artists. They’re given to flashy personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they give themselves multi-hyphenated job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and cover their laptops with vinyl stickers declaring their identities. Some consider themselves literary refiners. Consider the references embedded in certain product names: Apache Kafka, ScyllaDB, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

I admit that a lot of this applies to me. The difference is that I’m a little short on teardown talent, and my toy projects—with names like “Nabokov” (I know, I know)—are better off left on my laptop. I entered this world just as software engineering overtook banking as the most maligned profession. There is a lot of hatred and self-loathing that we have to contend with.

Perhaps this is why I see the ethos behind the Go programming language as both a rebuke and a possible corrective to my generation of striving. Its creators come from an era when programmers had smaller egos and fewer commercial ambitions, and it is, for my money, the most important general-purpose language of the new millennium – not the best at one thing, but almost the best at almost everything . . A model for our flashy times.

If that were me To categorize programming languages ​​as art movements would include mid-century utilitarianism (Fortran, COBOL), high-theory formalism (Haskell, Agda), American pragmatism (C#, Java), grassroots communitarianism ( Python, Ruby) and esoteric hedonism. (Befunge, Brainfuck). And I would say that Go, often described as “C for the 21st century,” represents neoclassicism: not so much a revolution as a legacy.

In 2007, three programmers at Google came together around a shared feeling that standard languages ​​like C++ and Java had become difficult to use and poorly adapted to today’s more cloud-oriented computing environment. One was Ken Thompson, formerly of Bell Labs and recipient of the Turing Award for his work on Unix, the mitochondrial cusp of operating systems. (These days, OS people don’t mess around with programming languages ​​anymore; doing both is akin to an Olympic high jumper who also qualifies for the marathon.) Joining him was Rob Pike, another Bell Labs alum who, along with Thompson, invented Unicode encoding created. standard UTF-8. You can thank them for your emoji.

Watching these young men from programming create Go was like seeing Scorsese, De Niro and Pesci reunite for The Irishman. Even the superficially SEO-unfriendly name could be forgiven. I mean, the sheer chutzpah of it. A move that only the reigning search engine king would dare.