going to? Hard to say, doesn't sound like it at all though. They want a non-breaking release, to prevent the Python 2-3 debacle. However, what will happen only time can tell.

Go 2 considered harmful?

I now really, really hope that when they originally named the language it was exclusively to set up this pun. Well played, friend, well played.

One of the major focuses at Gophercon was on Go 2.0 being an _extremely_ incremental process. Go 1 development is planned to continue with backwards-compatible changes being incrementally added, and Russ Cox hoped Go 2.0 would happen when Go 1.n+1 would either:

* have no changes to be made from Go 1.n other than backwards-incompatible ones, or

* would have no backwards-incompatible changes at all.

I get the feeling that the developers have learned a great deal about not making large breaking changes & segmenting the language.

The fact that Go is small, has a large community (outside googlers), and has a completely open spec makes it one of the least likely languages to just fade into obscurity.

The Go language accomplishes some amazing things so far, and it a pretty decent choice in the systems-programming space. Even if google dropped it, there would almost definitely be another company or group willing to be it's benevolent dictator(s).

Isn't it somewhat problematic to consider Go as being in the systems programming space? A garbage collector seems like a pretty good disqualifying factor for that.

You're right -- I really considered putting systems programming-ish in my comment because of that. I talk my way around the limitation in my own head because it really depends on the system you're programming -- a lot of even lower level systems these days come with a lot more memory and resources to manage. Maybe I'm just warping what the term means to my own ends.

I certainly hope not.

Can't speak for Angular, but in Python land, ~9 years later, people are still cleaning up the fallout of the changes from Python 2 to Python 3.

It wouldn't bode too well for such a young language as Go to go through the same process.

My personal observations are that Go is gaining a lot of steam in many places. Announcing that they will break compatibility would make those places strongly reconsider their commitment to Go.

> Announcing that they will break compatibility would make those places strongly reconsider their commitment to Go.

Umm, they've actually announced the opposite. Not sure why you say that.

I meant hypothetically. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

As in, if in some hypothetical scenario, Google announced that they would break compatibility, it would be bad.

Definitely agree with that.