Comment by jalfresi
11 years ago
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers."
I took that to mean "Our programmers are building products, not thinking about building programming languages"
11 years ago
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers."
I took that to mean "Our programmers are building products, not thinking about building programming languages"
It may go even further than that. Google has to produce multi-million line programs and maintain them for a decade or two. That's not a problem that most programming language researchers face. If researchers think about that, they usually do so in the abstract, rather than from a position of personal experience.
One place this shows up: Build times. Turning a 45-minute build into a 10-second build, times 30 programmers, times several builds a day for 10 years... that adds up to a really big difference.
It always astounds me when (inexperienced) developers play down build times as if they simply aren't that big an issue. They are hellish, creativity crushing monsters.
Also, static binaries -- so the DevOps guys don't hit you with sticks.
I still remember the first go program README.md I shipped. "Umm, get foo to box, ./foo in a way so that it runs persistently and at startup."
Easy way to get your apps to the front of the line in the deploy queue -- all the time.