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[5]WIRED
Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming
Language
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[38]Sheon Han
[39]Business
Sep 23, 2024 6:30 AM
Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming
Language
The language Go hails from an era when programmers had smaller egos and fewer
commercial ambitions. My generation of strivers has a lot to learn.
A marbel squirrel sculpture in a garden
ILLUSTRATION: SAMUEL TOMSON
Save
Save
Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, software engineers—consider themselves
“creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal
websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer
upon themselves multihyphenate job titles
(“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with
identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary
sophisticates. Consider the references smashed into certain product names:
Apache Kafka, ScyllaDB, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
[42]Machine Readable
An 8 bit lips character looking suspicious with its hand on its chin.
A regular column about programming. Because if/when the machines take over, we
should at least speak their language.
Much of that, I admit, applies to me. The difference is I’m a tad short on
talents to hyphenate, and my toy projects—with names like “Nabokov” (I know, I
know)—are better off staying on my laptop. I entered this world pretty much the
moment [43]software engineering overtook banking as the most reviled
profession. There’s a lot of hatred, and self-hatred, to contend with.
Perhaps this is why I see the ethos behind the programming language Go as both
a rebuke and a potential corrective to my generation of strivers. Its creators
hail from an era when programmers had smaller egos and fewer commercial
ambitions, and it is, for my money, the premier general-purpose language of the
new millennium—not the best at any one thing, but nearly the best at nearly
everything. A model for our flashy times.
If I were to categorize programming languages like art movements, there would
be mid-century utilitarianism (Fortran, COBOL), high-theory formalism (Haskell,
Agda), Americorporate pragmatism (C#, Java), grassroots communitarianism
(Python, Ruby), and esoteric hedonism (Befunge, Brainfuck). And I’d say Go,
often described as “C for the 21st century,” represents neoclassicism: not so
much a revolution as a throwback.
Back in 2007, three programmers at Google came together around the shared sense
that standard languages like C++ and Java had become hard to use and poorly
adapted to the current, more cloud-oriented computing environment. One was Ken
Thompson, formerly of Bell Labs and a recipient of the Turing Award for his
work on Unix, the mitochondrial Eve of operating systems. (These days, OS
people don’t mess with programming languages—doing both is akin to an Olympic
high jumper also qualifying for the marathon.) Joining him was Rob Pike,
another Bell Labs alum who, along with Thompson, created the Unicode encoding
standard UTF-8. You can thank them for your emoji.
Watching these doyens of programming create Go was like seeing Scorsese, De
Niro, and Pesci reunite for The Irishman. Even its flippantly SEO-unfriendly
name could be forgiven. I mean, the sheer chutzpah of it. A move only the
reigning search engine king would dare.
The language quickly gained traction. The prestige of Google must’ve helped,
but I assume there was an unmet hunger for novelty. By 2009, the year of Go’s
debut, the youngest of mainstream languages were mostly still from 1995—a true
annus mirabilis, when Ruby, PHP, Java, and JavaScript all came out.
It wasn’t that advancements in programming language design had stalled.
Language designers are a magnificently brainy bunch, many with a reformist zeal
for dislodging the status quo. But what they end up building can sometimes
resemble a starchitect’s high-design marvel that turns out to have drainage
problems. Most new languages never overcome basic performance issues.
But from the get-go, Go was (sorry) ready to go. I once wrote a small search
engine in Python for sifting through my notes and documents, but it was
unusably sluggish. Rewritten in Go, my pitiful serpent grew wings and took off,
running 30 times faster. As some astute readers might have guessed, this
program was my “Nabokov.”
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This is not to say that Go is a perfect language. It’s more workhorse than show
horse. And it came out 15 years ago, enough time for a stream of breakup
stories and critiques to cycle through the industry’s paper of record, Hacker
News.
To wit: Many find Go code ugly. There’s a procrustean uniformity to it, and it
lacks the tidy shorthands of, say, Ruby or Python, so even common patterns can
become messy and cluttered. (Ask a Go programmer about “error handling.”) Also,
you can’t run the code, even with correct syntax, unless certain styles are
strictly followed. Imagine a word processor that does not allow you to save
unless your essay is free of grammatical errors.
I’m happy to admit that Go lacks the ergonomics of newer languages. But I
struggle to dispel the suspicion that these are the complaints of a spoiled
era. If the chief engineer of the first-generation Ford Mustang were tasked
with designing a new line of cars, and did so remarkably—models of practicality
and workmanship—would you complain about them having no touchscreens?
It’s odd to think how young the field of computer science is. Alan Turing’s
paper that launched the field is less than a century old, and we live in a
small window of time where pioneers are alive and professionally active, even
into their eighties. Go is a language created by people who had nothing left to
prove.
I hope it isn’t too contrived to speak of a “late style” in programming. The
idea is usually attributed to the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who
observed a growing contradiction and alienation in Beethoven’s later work. The
literary critic Edward Said expanded on the notion in his posthumous book On
Late Style, discussing how some artists, when facing impending mortality,
reject traditional artistic closure and instead embrace fragmentation and
unresolved tension.
What I find more intriguing—and rarer than we might have thought—are the cases
where masters in their later years do accept a certain closure and, as Said put
it, maintain a “spirit of reconciliation and serenity.” Social media has
provided us with the disappointing yet sobering spectacle wherein supposedly
accomplished individuals—since we’re talking technology here, certain computer
scientists in AI who shall remain nameless come to mind—regularly engage in
unseemly reckonings with their residual baggage.
But when I think about Go, I feel a sense of serenity. Instead of involving
themselves in spats with young kvetchers, the Go team directs you to their FAQ
page—the gold standard of FAQ pages—written in a gentle, statesmanlike tone.
And with that, they rest their case. I suppose that’s where some people do end
up: completely, even plainly, at ease with their work. To know it’s possible,
someday, perhaps, is a balm. Maybe my generation will learn to tame our egos
and find our footing. We still have a few decades to make it so.
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References:
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/attention-spoiled-software-engineers-take-a-lesson-from-googles-programming-language/#main-content
[3] https://www.wired.com/account/saved
[5] https://www.wired.com/
[6] https://www.wired.com/category/security/
[7] https://www.wired.com/category/politics/
[8] https://www.wired.com/category/gear/
[9] https://www.wired.com/category/big-story/
[10] https://www.wired.com/category/business/
[11] https://www.wired.com/category/science/
[12] https://www.wired.com/category/culture/
[13] https://www.wired.com/category/ideas/
[14] https://shop.wired.com/
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[17] https://www.wired.com/category/security/
[18] https://www.wired.com/category/politics/
[19] https://www.wired.com/category/gear/
[20] https://www.wired.com/category/big-story/
[21] https://www.wired.com/category/business/
[22] https://www.wired.com/category/science/
[23] https://www.wired.com/category/culture/
[24] https://www.wired.com/category/ideas/
[25] https://shop.wired.com/
[26] https://www.wired.com/podcasts/
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[28] https://www.wired.com/newsletter?sourceCode=navbar
[29] https://www.wired.com/magazine
[30] http://wired.com/travel
[31] https://www.wired.com/tag/plaintext/
[32] https://www.wired.com/tag/wired-classic/
[33] https://www.wired.com/tag/wired-events/
[34] https://www.wired.com/category/wiredinsider/
[35] https://www.wired.com/tag/wired-consulting/
[36] https://jobs.wired.com/?source=navbar
[37] https://www.wired.com/coupons
[38] https://www.wired.com/author/sheon-han/
[39] https://www.wired.com/category/business
[42] https://www.wired.com/tag/machine-readable/
[43] https://www.wired.com/tag/programming/
[44] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-iphone-ios-18-ipados-18-new-features/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_8c1d84b3-dd85-4f7f-bece-ebc200c4adfb_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi
[45] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-iphone-ios-18-ipados-18-new-features/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_8c1d84b3-dd85-4f7f-bece-ebc200c4adfb_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi
[46] https://www.wired.com/story/carlo-acutis-millennial-patron-saint-internet/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_8c1d84b3-dd85-4f7f-bece-ebc200c4adfb_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi
[47] https://www.wired.com/story/carlo-acutis-millennial-patron-saint-internet/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_8c1d84b3-dd85-4f7f-bece-ebc200c4adfb_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi
[48] https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-office-chairs/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_8c1d84b3-dd85-4f7f-bece-ebc200c4adfb_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi
[49] https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-office-chairs/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_8c1d84b3-dd85-4f7f-bece-ebc200c4adfb_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi
[50] https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-espresso-machines/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_8c1d84b3-dd85-4f7f-bece-ebc200c4adfb_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi
[51] https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-espresso-machines/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_8c1d84b3-dd85-4f7f-bece-ebc200c4adfb_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi
[52] https://www.wired.com/newsletter/daily?sourceCode=BottomStories
[53] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-mission-to-give-ai-robot-body/
[54] https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-after-shark-tank-mark-cuban-just-wants-to-break-shit-especially-the-prescription-drug-industry/
[55] https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-biggest-bitcoin-mine-is-rattling-this-texas-oil-town/
[56] https://health.wired.com/?sourceCode=BottomStories
[57] https://www.wired.com/author/sheon-han/
[58] https://www.wired.com/tag/machine-readable/
[59] https://www.wired.com/tag/coding/
[60] https://www.wired.com/tag/programming/
[61] https://www.wired.com/tag/computers/
[62] https://www.wired.com/tag/computer-science/
[63] https://www.wired.com/tag/software/
[64] https://www.wired.com/tag/google/
[65] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-o1-strawberry-problem-reasoning/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[66] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-o1-strawberry-problem-reasoning/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[67] https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-the-godmother-of-ai-wants-everyone-to-be-a-world-builder/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[68] https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-the-godmother-of-ai-wants-everyone-to-be-a-world-builder/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[69] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-mission-to-give-ai-robot-body/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[70] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-mission-to-give-ai-robot-body/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[71] https://www.wired.com/story/hume-ai-emotional-intelligence/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[72] https://www.wired.com/story/hume-ai-emotional-intelligence/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[73] https://www.wired.com/story/crispr-enhanced-viruses-are-being-deployed-against-utis/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[74] https://www.wired.com/story/crispr-enhanced-viruses-are-being-deployed-against-utis/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[75] https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-16-supercycle/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[76] https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-16-supercycle/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[77] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vision-pro-persona-eye-tracking-spy-typing/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[78] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vision-pro-persona-eye-tracking-spy-typing/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[79] https://www.wired.com/story/an-er-doctors-cure-for-americas-gun-epidemic/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
[80] https://www.wired.com/story/an-er-doctors-cure-for-americas-gun-epidemic/#intcid=recommendations_wired-bottom-recirc-v4_c28d288f-1ad3-47fd-be7b-f9ca05c22f9f_roberta-similarity1
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