Ken Thompson (Multics, B, Ed, regular expressions, Unix, Plan 9), Rob Pike (sam, Plan 9, Limbo, Inferno), and Robert Griesemer (Java Hotspot compiler) have been working on a new programming language since 2007, which has just been announced by Google. A couple of the names associated with Go are virtually biblical within the programming community so I expect Go will get a lot of attention. The thing I find enthralling is that it intends to address concurrency within the language like Limbo, not as an add-on library. It also attempts to be more like interpreted, dynamically typed languages like Python that are widely used especially for web-based programming.
"Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted,
dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a
statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with
support for networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended
to be fast: it should take at most a few seconds to build a large
executable on a single computer. To meet these goals required
addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight
type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency
specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by libraries
or tools; a new language was called for.
"Go is mostly in the C family (basic syntax), with significant input
from the Pascal/Modula/Oberon family (declarations, packages), plus
some ideas from languages inspired by Tony Hoare's CSP, such as Newsqueak and Limbo (concurrency)."
Form today story "Google Under Fire For Calling Their Language Go":
(...)'Go!' was created by Francis McCabe and Keith Clark. McCabe published a book about the language in 2007, and he is not happy. (...)
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/11/12/1256234/Google-Under-Fire-For-Calling-Their-Language-Go
Posted by: Mateusz Loskot | November 12, 2009 at 05:10 PM