I don't understand why anybody would ever use Go outside of backend development. It's just language lacking lots of features without giving any benefits.

As DannyB mentioned in his post, Google is very technology driven, not usually driven by zealotry. Using Swift for this purpose has specific technical motivations that will be spelled out in the white papers we are publishing in April.

-Chris

I didn't mean to blame anybody in zealotry, it is purely technical considerations: it is much easier to maintain and develop codebase when you have more organizational control and can push changes to mainstream, comparing to forked project, when your changes may not be accepted to main branch.

This is actually surprising. Are the machine learning engineers at Google (besides Chris Lattner) admitting that Swift is a better language than Go? :) I would be surprised to find out if he was the only one involved in the decision

So, i'm the closest thing to Chris's counterpart in language land (I own all of Google's production and cloud programming languages, including Go). We also go way back to nearly the beginning of llvm days. Chris and I certainly talked about this.

I guess i don't really understand why anyone would think this is surprising. Like, i understand the knee jerk reaction, but I guess i don't understand why i would try to force him to do something else.

Chris is a high level engineer who decided he wanted to prototype and build a system in a language he's familiar with and feels is a good match for his problem space. People generally agree it's a good match for his problem space and his familiarity/etc makes him more effective in getting things done there. This doesn't mean anything else is a bad match (general purpose languages are often good at multiple use cases, hence the reason they are considered general purpose)

Why would I try to stop him and force him to use another language?

What tangible benefit would such a thing bring Google?

It's not like Google is a bunch of language zealots who think everything must be written in language X - it already supports a number of production languages, because different languages tend to have different tradeoffs for different use cases.

Outside of that framing, i have trouble thinking of a sane goal that would be served by trying to force him to do it in a different language.

But if i'm missing something, i'd love to know!

Well initially preferring to use a homegrown solution (like a programming language) isn’t necessarily a sign of zealotry. Dogfooding is good :)

Go just seems like a much worse match for this problem than Swift. Wrong type system, wrong compiler architecture, wrong runtime design, wrong language evolution strategy. This is in so many ways a great match for Swift.

"Well initially preferring to use a homegrown solution (like a programming language) isn’t necessarily a sign of zealotry. Dogfooding is good :)"

Sure it's not necessarily.

Building on top of something that is yours, simply because it is yours, is in fact a form of zealotry.

It is fairly unrelated (IMHO) to building on top of something that is yours so you can make sure you experience what your customers will experience.

IE Building your own ML on top of your Java thing because you want your customers to build ML on top of your Java thing would make sense. Building your own ML on top of your Java thing just because it's yours does not by itself make sense. (IE it has to provide some particular value over not building it yourself, etc, otherwise it's pretty clear zealotry)

Regardless of whether it is zealotry or not, Google certainly has a habit of developing everything (software side) of its own.

When Google started doing it, there weren't a lot of good options to solve the problems it has. As that has changed, so has Google (but like any large company, it changes slowly)

Yes, they're admitting that Swift is a way batter language for data science work.

To be perfectly frank, most languages probably are.

Also why not kotlin/kotlin-native?

Looks like some decisions at Google are made somehow chaotically, reminds me TypeScript Angular and Dart Angular.

Google is not monolithic. The Go designers have an emphasis on keeping the language simple (or lackluster in my opinion), and they would never agree to such a thing if they are still in power.

Because it's not about control?