1. I'm not so sure. Due to the threat of terrorism and tax fraud Governments would most probably not want, National Parliaments — if not controlled by a governmental majority — however most probably would, as this would help paint the acting government in a negative '1984' like light.
2. Massive fines would hopefully act as a deterrent.
Nothing, these would only apply as law to member states. Since December 13 2016, accession talks have been stopped and from the last interview to Erdogan that I've heard on an European TV, it was clear he no longer believes Turkey will ever be a part of EU, given the way that most member states populations and leadership look at Turkey (notwithstanding his presidency) and the difficulties that have been raised constantly throughout the whole accession process that started in 1987.
> The survey found there was strong opposition to Turkey joining the EU, with 61% of people saying they opposed it. This was most strongly expressed in Austria (82%), Germany, France and Belgium (all 73%).
yeah, I was doing yesterday more research into this, end up downloading Light & Motion which sounds best from what I heard, not that minimalistic but nice optimistic and Tony Anderson was also pretty good
I will check few of those I haven't heard, thank you
Last year when I upgraded my phone I was amused — but mostly horrified — by how easily one could get a SIM card for my own phone number with less than a modicum of information on me.
As I required to upgrade my Micro SIM to a Nano SIM, I went to one of my provider's shops and asked for a Nano SIM for phone number X. I was then asked to verbally confirm my name and address — and that's it. No ID card confirmation, no nothing. "Here you go sir, your new SIM card will be active within a few minutes. Can I help you with anything else?". What. the.
Last week I walked into a T-Mobile store and asked for a new SIM card to replace one I lost. I gave them the phone number and apparently an invalid pin (the sales rep verified that I gave him the wrong PIN). I asked if I should do something else to verify it was my account and nothing. They didn't ask for name, ID, or anything else, and they didn't charge me for the SIM card. I went home and popped it in and my account had clearly been transferred -- I didn't have to do any other activation steps or anything.
Great customer service experience, but horrible security.
Your story reminds me of when I ordered a $200 video card from Staples ship to store. I went to the cashier and told them they should have a video card I ordered. They asked for my name and gave it to me (inside the shipping box so they didn't even know the contents). It's not as bad as getting your phone number stolen but it opened my eyes how easy it would be to "steal" a package.
The problem with all these stories is that there is a physical interaction. Maybe there is a video or whatever, but for some reason people easily let their guard down when transaction is conducted in person.
That physical interaction is important. It means there's a human being in your country committing a crime on video. That same person could just pick up a product off the shelf and walk out with it too. Either way, they're putting themselves at risk of arrest.
When it's online, there's almost no risk because they're probably in Russia and leave no physical evidence.
Recently my dad entered his SIM PIN incorrectly three times and it locked him out. Turns out his mobile operator has an IVR service which hands out the PUK to any phone number you enter! No authentication whatsoever, just the phone number. How common is this?
Exact same thing happened to me. Upgraded my phone, needed to switch over to nano sim, walked into T-Mobile and chatted up the sales clerk and then walked out with my new nano sim without showing ID. I was dumb founded that it was so easy.
And yet, only very large companies are able to make a certain class of investments in infrastructure and services — that push technology and society forward as a whole — that small to mid companies due to lack of capacity never could, and governments due to lack of vision and political will never would.
Not quite sure i follow. Do you mean like self driving cars, neural networks, mapping the human genome, or perhaps the internet?
I guess IC's might be a good example, but the air force was really the only buyer that could afford them.
I dunno, maybe we're moving to a new model. the 20th century way seemed to be to pour massive amounts of money into research at universities, then commercialize whatever whatever happened to work out.
Corporations do interesting work, but they're sooooo resistant to change, it seems like their inventions always die on the vine. Kodak digital cameras for example.
Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? Or microsoft their os/office money? or apple and phones? etc.
> Corporations do interesting work, but they're sooooo resistant to change, it seems like their inventions always die on the vine.
Some do, others have been able to remain relevant for a very long time. Thankfully we have a societal mechanism to prune unproductive companies, it's called bankruptcy.
> Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? Or microsoft their os/office money? or apple and phones? etc.
So far they have. Google for instance started its self driving car project in 2009, at the height of the recession. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to dismiss the project as wasteful spending when everybody else was tightening their belt.
24 billion in the bank (cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities), revenue up 2 billion ~10% from 2008. So brave [1]
And they of course started the project by hiring the DARPA grand challenge winners. Which, yes, corporations can refine original research, but it's very rare they try something new. And if they do try something new, it's incredibly vulnerable to being defunded. Google is exceptional, kinda. I hope they'll get more milage out of their special project than bell labs did.
And more to the point, the kodak example is key. Kodak made money selling film. Digital cameras were a direct threat to selling film. Google can do some interesting things, but if anything useful is a direct threat to ad revenue, it'll be killed.
This is the same Google which was started to commercialize the NSF-sponsored work that Larry Page and Sergei Brin did? The same one which hired many of the DARPA grand challenge winners to work on self-driving cars? The one whose AI efforts are being performed by a number of prominent researchers whose work and training was significantly supported by federal research grants?
Google is great but I see them as an example of the public / private pairing working out well and generating far more new economic value than went into that foundational spending.
> Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech?
University and government research is also super important. Google publishes papers not code, whereas universities often publish their code and that's doing more to move AI forward than Google.
But Google is willing to make large research bets too.
Yeah, I'm definitely not saying Google isn't doing important work. I just think this highlights the key role government funding plays in ensuring that businesses don't have to pay for all of that basic research and training.
That's basically the answer to that question: Google isn't risking their core business on this because so much of the foundation has been set. If, say, in 2003 they'd gone to investors and asked for money to fund AI research it'd have been seen as too risky, especially since the collapse of the 1980s AI bubble was still well within living memory. Once NSF, DARPA, et al. had continued to fund the scientists, however, things matured to the point where it has a more acceptable level of risk to get in on a huge field.
“derisked” is [willful?] misrepresentation. This isn't a hard argument: board early research requires a lot of speculative work which doesn't pan out for everything which does, not to mention tons of basic training and equipment investment. Companies have a hard time justifying that and, unsurprisingly, the record shows they largely don't. Government funding operates with different incentives and timescales and has a lengthy track record of success getting ideas to the point where companies are willing to foot the remaining development costs.
Most of the 20th century's defining technologies started that way, from microchips and the internet to biotech. You don't need to get everything to say that the model can support a few misses.
The jet engine case seems especially hard to claim as an exception since early development was predicated on military sales and, for example, a quick trip to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_jet_engine shows the origins of both the British and German programs being a RAF officer's patent-worthy idea.
Remember, I'm not saying that the government invents everything but that basic reasearch and major long-term development is hard to do when you need to show profits right now. The history of your example shows many examples of that process where the government funding allowed things to reach the point where they could be successfully commercialized for other purposes.
The financing of Whittle's and Ohain's jet engines did not come from the government, nor did government finance their incorporation into working, flying aircraft. Whittle's idea he had on his own, not as part of a government research project.
The US military even ordered Lockheed to stop working on a jet engine, and concentrate on piston engines. This changed after being faced with the ME-262.
The transistor, too. Airplanes. Liquid fueled rockets. Communications satellites (Arthur Clarke). Radio. TV. Einstein. C. C++. Java. C#.
And the glaring absense of defining technologies coming from communist economies, where it was 100% government doing the research.
The US government spends megabucks on R+D. It would be astonishing if that produced no results. But it is an error to thereby conclude that new technologies could not otherwise exist.
Google ~14B, Amazon ~14B MS ~10B Apple ~10B and FB ~6B for about 50B all together.
So, concretely, we should expect just the big five to produce roughly 1/3 as much as publicly funded science, assuming they're of equal quality. More like 2/3's if we exclude military research. Although you don't come out and say it, you're implying private is more efficient.
I dunno. I think the feds get a big discount by using grad student labor. Fundamentally, the perform different roles. Doctoral research is foundational stuff that corporations take and refine. Sure, i can quibble over each one of your examples. But that's not really the point.
I don't think any corporation was going to go looking for gravity waves, or Proxima B.
So many problems are a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Broadly, public funding tends to fill the role of exploration. Private funding tends to fill the role of exploitation. There's no crisp line. Corporations surely explore, and universities surely exploit. But again, broadly, i think the public exploration/private exploitation split is a good one, and i think it's how the 20th century worked pretty much worked.
My argument is with the notion that if government didn't fund X, X never would have happened. The existence of the internet is the epitome of this kind of thinking. It's like saying if someone paid by the government had an idea to connect two towns with a road, therefore nobody would have ever had such an idea otherwise.
This fallacious reason is obviously false, as FidoNET proves, but that doesn't deter the notion.
The cherry-picked examples are classic confirmation bias, and are non-falsifiable because nobody can go back in time and defund a government project.
There's plenty of non-government money being plowed into basic research - just look at the endowments of top universities like MIT. There would likely be much more if the government did not fund it, just like I'd not be willing to fund a road between A and B if there's a way I can get the government to do it for me.
It's not a claim that things would never happen but that it'd take much longer. Yes, private investment exists but it's so much smaller — MIT is legendary, one of the top schools in the world, has a full-time development office getting donations, etc. but the bulk of their research is federal by a large margin.
I note that you dismiss the foundational technologies of the last century as cherry-picking but fail to present any data to support claims which are well outside the mainstream. Do you have any sources to back those assertions up?
That's true, but it's not clear which way the causality runs. If wealth were more evenly distributed, ordinary people could pool their resources to make the same investments. They can't do that now because they have no disposable income to invest.
VCs are agents of ordinary people who have pooled their resources to make investments, just separated by many fee-taking layers of Wall Street bureaucracy.
Wall Street ultimately gets its money from American workers' retirement investments (whether personal 401k and IRA accounts, or institutional pension funds).
While totally true, there are systemic issues here. Any individual worker has little choice of what to do with their investments for retirement unless they get into taking tons of time and energy to be activist investors or go out of their way to avoid the path of least resistance and invest in unusual ways.
Point is: it's not like workers are all supportive of the VC decisions or anything. It's the concentrated power of the people who manage all the funds that matters, and not the fact that a bunch of otherwise disconnected individual workers have put their money in.
Of course, stuff like openinvest.co seem at least a good direction…
But people do in fact make their own small investments when they opt for one provider of a service or the other.
For a multi billion dollar infrastructure project, your capacity to contribute with either 50K or 50$ would still amount to less than a drop in a bucket. For a massive multi billion infrastructure project to succeed it would still rely on either a state actor or a very large number of investors, or, as is the case I'm making, a large amount customers.
If I opt for your company as my provider of a given service, and very large number of other people do too, we're enabling your company — via the pooling of our payments — for you to do further investments and improvements to your service.
That's true, but it misses the point. Capitalism and democracy work best when there is competition. Monopolies -- both economic and political -- generally lead to bad outcomes. When ultimate decision-making power becomes too unevenly distributed, it becomes very difficult to prevent monopolies from forming.
I don't know about other countries, but in America, being a monopoly is not at all outlawed. The criminality associable to monopoly here is when a monopoly abuses their monopoly power.
If I am the only company in America that produces widget x, I have a de facto monopoly, but I am not guilty of anything until and unless I attempt to exert my monopolistic influence to prevent competitors from taking my market share. If I am a pure monopoly, then it's possible that just running a loss-leading sale could result in antitrust violations, but if I am not a monopoly, or if I am a minority provider of widget x, then loss-leading sales are a presumptively lawful activity.
Edit: I believe closeparen makes this point more precisely with his post in this same topic:
> If I am the only company in America that produces widget x, I have a de facto monopoly
That's not what monopoly really means. Peter Thiel (for whom I have lots of criticism) makes these things really clear in the way he discusses them. You could open up a British Food restaurant somewhere and be the only one in town. That doesn't make you a monopoly because the actual market is for all types of dining. There's not specific British Food market that you've captured. When businesses want to taut their power and monopoly status (whether to delude themselves or to get investors or whatever), they will pretend that the market is as narrow as their particular product. When they want to convince regulators that they are just one in a competing market, they'll widen the market as much as possible…
The US hasn't enforced its anti-trust legislation in over 30 years. Some link Reagan's "assault" on anti-trust to the breakage of the American job market. There's been zero net job creation in the US between 1999 and 2009, a time which also saw significant consolidation.
Small businesses drive net job growth, and they are also more innovative, producing more patents per employee than large firms.
Not to mention, smaller businesses allow more people to own capital. I'm sick of economic discussions that focus on jobs and wages - ownership is what gets people out of serfdom.
But, little guys are feeling the squeeze. "The Goliaths of today are so big and so adept at protecting their turf that they leave few niches open to exploit."
So, this isn't only about privacy, or the false perception that "big is evil." It's about economy as ecosystem. "Biodiversity" in the economy creates robustness against hard times and distributes resources in ways that allow many participants to thrive. Monocultures are extractive, and ultimately fragile.
> more innovative, producing more patents per employee than large firms
Patents are not correlated with innovation. Tons of innovative things are never patented, and the majority of patents are largely bullshit. The patent system mostly gives tons of money to patent lawyers and power to companies who know how to use their patents to threaten innovators.
It may be true that small businesses are more innovative, but we simply can't use patents as a measure of innovation.
Not only that, if you (only) have a large number of small investors, there will often be a lot of conflicting ideologies and interests, sometimes diametrically opposed. Hard for a company to have any long-term direction that way.
Why talk in terms of one big company? Maybe small investors with conflicting ideas and interests would like to own and run small companies. Except, a couple of big companies are making that very difficult.
Maybe. Depends if they set themselves up as a co-op. They could instead essentially start as a highly focused VC. At that point the control will probably rest in the hands of the board and management.
But the investors have the power to replace the board. This is called "representative democracy" and it's widely considered, despite its flaws, a better way to govern human affairs than dictatorship or oligarchy.
True, and startups seem to be where most of the innovation is happening right now. I think universities (and the Internet) do a pretty good job when it comes sharing the deep domain knowledge required to innovate.
> and governments due to lack of vision and political will never would
Governments (US and Soviet) went to the moon. The Internet would not exist without massive military (i.e. government) sponsoring.
But yes, when I am looking at our governments right now, it's hard to find something as progressive as this, except that marijuana is on the rise, Macron has a 50:50 women government and invited scientists from the US to France. The other governments seem to be racing full speed in reverse for me.
They push society forward along THEIR agenda.
That agenda can be the most open, inclusive and diverse agenda ever, but it's gonna be the agenda of a corporation nonetheless.
In my ideal world, you know who should be in charge of such a push? American friends, please, breathe deeply: The State should.
I'm largely a social democrat, but LOL if you think the government would be even a quarter as competent as Google at pushing technology forward.
Just read any description from people who've worked at both normal government IT shops (really anywhere that's not 18F or the USDS) and private industry how they feel about governmental technology culture and processes.
Like okay, investing in infrastructure, like putting fiber everywhere? Sure, I'm down with that. Everything else, I think the private sector has shown itself to be plenty more capable. Let's let the government stick to its strengths, shall we?
> I'm largely a social democrat, but LOL if you think the government would be even a quarter as competent as Google at pushing technology forward.
> Just read any description from people who've worked at both normal government IT shops (really anywhere that's not 18F or the USDS) and private industry how they feel about governmental technology culture and processes.
The governments brought us MP3. (Fraunhofer is funded entirely by their own patents and the German government).
The governments brought us many more technologies, standards, algorithms, etc.
Alone the projects funded by the German government have brought more to the tech world than Google ever has, or ever will.
Then look at the projects the US has funded.
For fucks sake, the US Government gave us the Internet!
This.
But of course US Americans (including foreigners living there long enough) will just interpret the World according to the usual equation: US == World.
It's not your fault guys and we love you the way you're wired, but for god's sake, could you sometimes consider there's some form of Intelligent Life outside of your borders?
I don't necessarily disagree with the premise, but I take pause at the notion that the American state does not have its own agenda.
We've seen the state infiltrate encryption standards to deliberately weaken them. We've seen the state deny and attempt to suppress dissident truths. We've seen the state spy on its citizenry using loopholes and non-standards. We've seen the state fund drug cartels, collude with the media to influence the public, pass cronyist legislation to benefit campaign donors, etc.
Why should their agenda be considered any less self-serving than that of a corporation's?
In theory and in an actual democracy the state would represent the will of the people, and its agenda would align with the citizenry.
In the US at least I don't think it is so much the government doesn't represent the people than 2 centuries of usurpation have established a system to produce enough brainwashed drones to the will of power that they can act with the facade of democracy while actively harming the indoctrinated. It seems not to actually take a majority to create an environment where the state acts against the interests of the people, just enough of a minority to give voice and legitimacy to regressive ideology.
I think this century might be the time when all us intellectuals have to come to terms with how, in the same way you cannot get everyone into STEM to handle automation eating the economy, you cannot get everyone into enlightened politics where voters inform themselves with fact and evidence. At best, a minority, and today, a majority of people are either naturally or nurtured (often intentionally) to be incapable of participation in science and rational debate. And as long as you have this uninformed, illogical portion of the population (and of course the smaller it is the more functional your society is) it will erode democracy and liberty through powerful people taking advantage of that weakness.
What we see in the US right now is that weakness in Democracy instead being a gaping wound that has been bleeding - probably since the founding of the country, made worse by many events in history (the civil war, great depression, 9/11) that make the wound bleed greater, yielding the state from being a democracy to an oligarchy ruled by ideological indoctrination and exploitation rather than good will for ones fellow man.
That was long winded, but my point is don't throw out the notion that nations can act to improve the circumstances of their people in the general case - the US is demonstrably not doing that for observable reasons that could be fixed, but would require everyone to want to fix it.
Be fair, we're no longer living in the 60's, and as we all know the impetus to reach "the stars" was driven by as much as national pride as well as show of force and muscle flexing to the rest of the world. I concur that the state has been massively important in terms of research and investment from the 50's to the 90's that enabled most of what we're enjoying today, but if the past 10-20 years are anything to go by, the paradigm has shifted from state driven innovation to private driven innovation.
As the author of said post I disagree. Given that the original post to which I commented refers to Amazon, Google and others — entities born in mid to late 90s operating to this day — any analisys of state action vs these corporations must be done within the context of this timeframe and not before.
In regards to "moving goal posts", I have not, and will not ever do such a thing, as to me a debate is not about winning anything, but clarifying points of view. If I wanted to move your own "goal posts" I would point you back 200-100 years, and talk about the Industrial Revolution, Railroad construction in the US, Telegraphs and Phones, invention of flight, among many others all but initially driven, built and financed by private money.
Having been on the internet since before Linux or web browsers existed, and studied a good deal of economics and history going back to antiquity, and having grown up in a town founded 1500 years ago, you're really not telling me anything new here. I'm sorry but I disagree with your approach of making sweeping statements of economic theory but limiting them to the timeframe of a single generation. I know your original comment was not meant to be exhaustive, but I found the economic analysis superficial.
> Having been on the internet since before Linux or web browsers existed, and studied a good deal of economics and history going back to antiquity, and having grown up in a town founded 1500 years ago, you're really not telling me anything new here.
Fantastic credentials.
> I'm sorry but I disagree with your approach of making sweeping statements of economic theory but limiting them to the timeframe of a single generation.
Given that we're discussing the impact of a specific set of companies that brought societal/economical issues that are new — such as data privacy/control —, and have no other examples in history to guide us in dealing or discussing them, we must focus on this period. Regarding "sweeping economic theory", I do not hold to such presumption.
> I know your original comment was not meant to be exhaustive, but I found the economic analysis superficial.
Reading comprehension. I should probably have added an emphasis in "a _certain class_ of investments". I find your analysis of my comments superficial, and clearly you do not want to discuss and clarify points of view but to "win an argument". That's a game I won't play, so by all means, consider yourself victorious.
That's not the only way. People engage voluntarily in cooperative, yet temporary agreements, to work on projects for the benefit of the whole group. Companies join in trade groups which are somewhat similar. So possibly a new class of temporary corporation, in which corporations invest, for a specific life time and goal purpose, where they can share resources and a common goal, without any one company basically railroading local, state, or national politics. Or any one company's business being disrupted means the end of that venture.
It depends on the perspective of what "large" means.
If "large" means "rich", then you are right.
However, if "large" means "comprised of many employees", then this is not necessarily true.
So perhaps a first good step is to put a limit on the number of employees. This also enforces a "modular" style of working, where companies can more easily be swapped for other companies, and more reuse of "company-modules" can happen.
An employee cap would benefit big tech companies hugely. Tech companies would receive an even greater share of investment than they currently do, as even the largest tech companies pale in comparison to say Walmart (in terms of employment)
it's not 'lack of vision and political will' that stymies government initiatives--that's some TED talk bs. and i shudder to think that we're necessarily dependent on the benevolence and 'vision' of large companies to drive society forward.
Then what does? Most of the innovation we have witnessed and enjoy in our society for the past 20-30 years has not been driven by governmental money or agencies but by private money.
Why don't we have a "government YC" (yeah, I don't mean DARPA-like, or the other mechanisms for finding funding from the government, which requires way too much navigation f bureaucratic paper-work and hoop-jumping) - an office of the government that can allow any individual to apply for seed funding for ANY idea in ANY industry that they can see through - make the process nimble and quick. Ensure that there is infrastructure/systems to allow for accurate tracking and reporting on the spend of monies given - think an EDD card that the startup entity gets and all expenses are tracked via the transactions on the card. Integrate it with banks and other private and public sector services with credits, like compute credits from amzn/goog etc... tax services, payroll etc...
And when you apply - it effectively sets-up an individual LLC in your name as the defacto entity to track your startups progress with giving you an EIN etc...
Heck, this should be a simple thing to architect if everyone in the business/startup world were truly supportive of, and willing to actually be, the "innovation" unicorn they all claim to be.
Examples? The internet, web & search, gene sequencing & engineering, deep learning, self-driving vehicles, VR, 3-d printing, modern batteries, wifi, etc. all followed the same path where massive government research funding and with e.g. the humane genome project or DARPA grand challenge even more direct support.
It's true that private investment was also important but that generally only enters the picture when something is developed enough to the point that investors can see an eventual payoff. As a simple example, Google, Yahoo, and Lycos were all direct results from people like Larry Page getting NSF research grants:
Typically, isnt the largest expense for a tech company payroll? Companies like the big 5 may be anomalies because they operate a number of their own data centers
To my knowledge and you are exempt for expensive industrial equipment. Now you have a sitation where Whatsapp is more worth than a big global enterprise like Sony, but haven't required nowhere near the same amount of workers or capital.
Yeah. We have those tiny things called governments too. You might know them for some investments such as, the US interstate highways, space flight, the Internet. It's amazing how the collective will of the people has managed all of that without forming a very large company.
There are countless millions of lifeless beautiful giant rock worlds carved and shaped throughout the eons by the interaction of elements. And yet, there's only one of such rocks, that we know so far, has been graced by the beauty of life. Life spreads, grows, adapts, multiplies. It, just like all other elements in the universe that came before it, shapes its environment as it interacts with it. Life isn't any different from the wind and water that shapes the mountains, or the meteor that carves a valley deep into the earth.
Back in 2013, after a complicated break up, I decided that seeing photos of my ex randomly appearing with her new SO in our common friends posts was not helping me at all, and so, I left Facebook. After all these years I've not missed it one bit. You end up knowing who truly cares about you, as they will always reach you whether you are on Facebook or not.
No, they had tons of experience at Google scale and was a language born out of frustration as much as need. They needed a language that was:
1) comparable with c++ in terms of speed
2) had extremely fast compilation times
3) easy to use, learn and familiar looking, for quick engineer buy in
4) easy to write concurrent & parallel work with
5) designed for tooling & network applications
6) batteries included
Among many, many others. Neither is Go an hammer, nor is everything a nail. For the use cases Go was designed for, I am yet to use a language as pleasant to work with as Go.
1) Any statically typed language nowadays is comparable with C++ in terms of speed, unless you fuck up the implementation really badly.
2) This is a complete non-issue -- with Google infrastructure, it's enough to not be significantly slower than C++, which is really a low bar.
3) Go is definitely easier to use than C++, I agree. That said, it also has enough of idiosyncrasies to make it familiar mostly to people used to writing Plan 9 C, starting from "nil" instead of "null", and ending with "dial" instead of "connect".
4) I never noticed how it is any easier to do it than in, say, Java. Most of the large Go programs I've seen tend to leak goroutines, for one thing.
5) Maybe it was designed for these, though I don't quite see the way it's better suited for network applications than, say, Java.
6) It's also a total non-issue at Google.
I have a year of experience writing Go tooling and network applications at Google, and it definitely wasn't enough for me to see the light. The rest of my team had quite similar experience (except of one guy who was a Go fan already before joining the company), and we would often make fun of Go's inconsistencies, idiosyncrasies, and the whole NIH approach of the language authors and maintainers.
Go is not bad language, it would have been great if it was 1989, and your only serious alternative was writing ANSI C. Unfortunately, it's been almost two decades since the 80s, and we figured out some things in the meantime. We now know how to do generics correctly, for one thing, and we already understood that null pointers have been a billion dollar mistake. The worst sin of Go though is that in the true "worse is better" spirit of Unix, it filled a gap for a better C++ by being only marginally better, taking away space for other, actually better contenders that don't happen have a billion dollar company backing them.
> is that in the true "worse is better" spirit of Unix, it filled a gap for a better C++ by being only marginally better, taking away space for other, actually better contenders that don't happen have a billion dollar company backing them.
I think it ended up being 1) not sufficiently low-level, and 2) a bit too insular in its ecosystem, to really fill that niche. Which is what allowed Rust to seriously contend for it, and I think Rust is going to be the winner.
> Among many, many others. Neither is Go an hammer, nor is everything a nail. For the use cases Go was designed for, I am yet to use a language as pleasant to work with as Go.
You need to learn more languages (and really learn them).
I feel these assumptions were true when Go design started, but the world has moved on. Even 'boring' languages such as Swift (Apple default) and Java8 has generics and functional programming now.
Even Fortran added some support for generic programming in 2003, and functional programming before that. It's all about how general purpose you plan on being...
