When I travel I like to have a hamburger at a McDonald's restaurant. There are a number of these to be found around the world.

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Self-referential functions and the design of options

I've been trying on and off to find a nice way to deal with setting options in a Go package I am writing. Options on a type, that is. The package is intricate and there will probably end up being dozens of options. There are many ways to do this kind of thing, but I wanted one that felt nice to use, didn't require too much API (or at least not too much for the user to absorb), and could grow as needed without bloat.

I've tried most of the obvious ways: option structs, lots of methods, variant constructors, and more, and found them all unsatisfactory. After a bunch of trial versions over the past year or so, and a lot of conversations with other Gophers making suggestions, I've finally found one I like. You might like it too. Or you might not, but either way it does show an interesting use of self-referential functions.

I hope I have your attention now.

Let's start with a simple version. We'll refine it to get to the final version.

First, we define an option typ…
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Less is exponentially more

Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012.

This is a personal talk. I do not speak for anyone else on the Go team here, although I want to acknowledge right up front that the team is what made and continues to make Go happen. I'd also like to thank the Go SF organizers for giving me the opportunity to talk to you.

I was asked a few weeks ago, "What was the biggest surprise you encountered rolling out Go?" I knew the answer instantly: Although we expected C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative, instead most Go programmers come from languages like Python and Ruby. Very few come from C++.

We—Ken, Robert and myself—were C++ programmers when we designed a new language to solve the problems that we thought needed to be solved for the kind of software we wrote. It seems almost paradoxical that other C++ programmers don't seem to care.

I'd like to talk today about what prompted us to create Go, and why the result should not have surpris…
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Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC

Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now know it was. It's a bit of a time capsule now, and I was able resurrect it. Importing into Blogger was a bit of an ordeal that informs some of the points raised here, but other than that I make no comment on the contents beyond apologizing for the tone.


This Dorado is MINE, ALL MINE!

Rob Pike
April 29, 1984

A collection of impressions after doing a week’s work (rather than demo reception) at PARC. Enough is known about the good stuff at PARC that I will concentrate on the bad stuff. The following may therefore leave too negative an impression, and I apologize. Nonetheless...

Dorados work, and although most people at PARC now have their personal machine, it is hard to find a spare one for a visitor (e.g. me), and the allocation method is interesting. There are rooms full of Dorados in racks, and each office has a terminal in it. To connect a machine…
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