Comment by nindalf
3 years ago
It’s interesting you mention Google because they do have quasi-monopoly profits that allow them to fund a lot of different things. Sure, they launch a new chat app every year and close it. But look beyond that.
Their profits allow them to staff projects that we benefit from. For example, programming languages like Go, Dart and (soon) Carbon. Go is a particularly good example here because it was literally created by Bell Labs alumni working at Google.
And it’s not just languages. No other organisation in the world wants to create another operating system. We’ve reached a local maxima with Windows, Linux and macOS (+iOS) that no one has the capability of challenging. The sensible thing is to run these operating systems till the end of time because they’re good enough. And yet Google with its profits says “how about we build an OS with a completely different approach?”
Quite apart from Google’s impact on the world, we benefit from having the option of Go, Fuschia and the rest of it. This is the product of research and development they have funded. Even if we don’t use them directly, we learn from their approach for future attempts to improve things.
>For example, programming languages like Go, Dart and (soon) Carbon.
So what’s innovative about them, that hasn’t been tried before?
>No other organization wants to create another operating system.
Erm, what? Lots of companies created, and still create, new operating systems, it’s just that they don’t have the PR to make noise about it. Also what’s this “different approach” you’re talking about? Capability based security is some 50 years old, has been implemented several times, and is the default sandboxing model in FreeBSD.
Can you show some really crucial inventions from Google, comparable to eg Unix, or transistor? Inventions, as in, something else turn repackaging old ideas with lots of marketing around them?
What a curious standard you use to judge inventions. Inventions from Google inspired by previous approaches are discredited as derivative ... while inventions by Bell Labs also inspired by previous approaches get a free pass?
Are you under the impression that Unix was the first operating system, or that C was the first programming language? What do you reckon about C++, also invented at Bell Labs? The folks at Bell Labs were giants and they stood on the shoulders of giants.
Carbon could make a substantial difference to the safety of C++ software by migrating such codebases to a relatively safer language. That's an improvement that we benefit from because Google and friends are publishing it as FOSS. Has a similar approach of gradual migration been done before? Kotlin and TypeScript did it. Eschewing C++ templates for generics? That's from Swift. Using syntax that's easy to read and to parse? Inspired by Rust. They're up front that they're inspired by all these successful languages.
But who cares? The fact is, something doesn't need to be completely novel for it to be useful. You can denigrate the work of others all you like, but all work that's done by humans is inspired by previous work by someone else. That's a fundamental fact of life. Even something as game changing as the transistor was inspired by existing vacuum tubes.
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