Nov 11

Written by:
2009/11/11 12:58 PM 

The search giant released Go, an open-source development language that Google believes will combine performance with speed, and one that the company probably hopes will reshape the development and software industries in its favor. But despite the hype at the moment I believe it will fail and not make it to main stream. Here are my reasons.

Too much diversity

Too many fingers in too many pies. What is Google, a search engine, a development house, an advertising agency? They are into Cloud computing, communication and collaboration, search. You name it Google seems to want to do it. What, are they trying to compete and take over from Microsoft. If I learned anything as a blogger it is this. Find what you do well, and do it well. Don't do too many things. You know, jack of all trades master of none. This to me would seem to dilute the core business and functionality of Google.

Too Young.

This new programming language is still too young. It was only conceived in September 21, 2007. Google has not been in the programming language sector for any length of time to gain credibility. It is one thing to develop a language for internal use, another all together different matter to develop that for public consumption.

More mature languages out there.

There are so much more mature languages available for us to use. With the likes of PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rail, C#, VB, C++, need I go on, why would we need another one.. These languages are established. They have good support groups, loads of professionals, and tons and tons of already written and test and deployed applications. 

Nothing new under the sun.

A new programming language is nothing new. Although Google says that there hasn't been a new language in over a decade. Do they mean completely new, or o they mean new versions. All the languages have undergone version enhancements and upgrades. They are in effect new.

But have you ever considered how many languages there actually are. There are thousands. Check out his list of programming languages from Wikipedia. That, not counting the various BASIC dialects available. Google is just adding to this never ending pool.

Same old Same Old.

Very few languages are built from the ground up. As in directly from assembler or even straight machine code. There are just a few basic first level languages that many use to build their own. They are C, C++, assembler. Google Go is just another mixing bowl and fruit salad of these languages. They have themselves admitted that it is based on C, it’s front end is C++ has bits of Python and Pascal in it. The runtime is essentially C. So what’s new about it? If I wanted a new programming language I will use one that is tried and tested.

No IDE.

Time is money. RAD is the name of the game. If you don't know what that is, let me tell you. It stands for  Rapid Application Development. IDE's and streaming code is what gives you RAD. When clients pay by the hour they want the best hour they can get. They do not want to pay someone to spend hours and hours programming a web or windows form or any application by hand that can take minutes to do via an IDE. I don't want to waste my time coding in notepad when I can drag and drop, then add my custom functionality later.

Lack of functionality and features

Google have admitted that GO does not pride itself on functionality. Don't be surprised when you find out that it does not include the functionality that you expect and are used to. Google have said that they left out a whole lot of feature to make the program slick, fast and easy. Hey I could have done that myself, but then why would anyone want to use it. Are we going back in time or forward, we do not want less we want more. Go will fail because of its lack of features.

Google is not using it.

I mean really, this is a biggie. If you are going to promote a new language you got to e using it yourself. Google admits that it is not mature enough to use in a production environment. Do you think I am going to use it.

"The Go project was conceived to make it easier to write the kind of servers and other software Google uses internally, but the implementation isn't quite mature enough yet for large-scale production use."

No OOP.

OOP stands for Object-Orientated Programming. Go is not strictly a OOP program. There is no inheritance, no sub classing,. Google can't even make up their own mind. They say it is OOP and they say it isn't. Are we going backwards here?

A new learning curve

With so little time on our hands, very few people want to spend unproductive time learning a new language. They would rather stick with their language and move on with it's version releases. I know this as I cam out of such a dilema. I was originally a dBASE programmer. The language dwindled to almost nothing. But I kept with it because I could program in it faster than I could learn another language. But eventually I made the change. It was had and a huge learning curve. Not something that many programmers will do.

Conclusion.

So what do you think of the new Go by Google. Will you use it? Will it take off? Have your say in the comments below.

Oh and remember the free advertising competition I am running. The best comments will win a week free advertising

Related Reading:

 

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The Top 10 Programming Languages You Should Learn

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Learning a new programming language

Is there a Linux IDE that can rival Visual Studio?

Dynamic Types in C# 4.0 – Visual Studio 2010

Developing C# applications using Free Tools

Is PHP a skill set or a professional track.

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