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.

Popular posts from this blog

Go: Ten years and climbing

Image
Drawing Copyright ©2017 Renee French

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of Go.

The initial discussion was on the afternoon of Thursday, the 20th of September, 2007. That led to an organized meeting between Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at 2PM the next day in the conference room called Yaounde in Building 43 on Google's Mountain View campus. The name for the language arose on the 25th, several messages into the first mail thread about the design:

Subject: Re: prog lang discussion From: Rob 'Commander' Pike Date: Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 3:12 PM To: Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson i had a couple of thoughts on the drive home. 1. name 'go'. you can invent reasons for this name but it has nice properties. it's short, easy to type. tools: goc, gol, goa. if there's an interactive debugger/interpreter it could just be called 'go'. the suffix is .go ...

(It's worth statin…
Read more

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…
Read more

Error handling in Upspin

The Upspin project uses a custom package, upspin.io/errors, to represent error conditions that arise inside the system. These errors satisfy the standard Go error interface, but are implemented using a custom type, upspin.io/errors.Error, that has properties that have proven valuable to the project.

Here we will demonstrate how the package works and how it is used. The story holds lessons for the larger discussion of error handling in Go.

Motivations

A few months into the project, it became clear we needed a consistent approach to error construction, presentation, and handling throughout the code. We decided to implement a custom errors package, and rolled one out in an afternoon. The details have changed a bit but the basic ideas behind the package have endured. These were:

To make it easy to build informative error messages.To make errors easy to understand for users.To make errors helpful as diagnostics for programmers.
As we developed experience with the package, some other motivations…
Read more