Is Go the spiritual successor to Pike?
In the excellent GOPL book [1], there's a part called "The Origins of Go" in the Preface that lists languages which had an influence on Go (there's an accompanying diagram). You can see this part of the book (including the aforementioned diagram) in the official sample at [2] (page xii).
The languages are: ALGOL 60, Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, Object Oberon, Oberon-2, CSP, Squeak, Newsqueak, Alef, and C.
[1] The Go Programming Language, by Alan A. A. Donovan and Brian W. Kernighan https://www.gopl.io/
Re:Pike Programming Language
by Abishek_Muthian on Saturday May 21, 2022 @11:12PM
(#31464559)
Thanks for the information, But is the book still relevant today? Since Go has relatively very fast iteration cycle it now has lot more tricks than it did in 2015; Some of them default to other programming languages like 'sort'.
I doubt that Pike was on the Go designers' radars - but to me personally, it certainly feels so. Go is now my favorite language.
Who knows though, the Pike language's main creator has been at Google since well before Go got started.
Also his name is Pike ;)
The Rob Pike name connection is indeed a fun detail.
you are not the first to ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944519 :-)
I still miss working with this language. It just makes so much sense to me.
The way I think of it is as a quite a lot more performant version of Python with a C-like syntax and a much more consistently designed - while still very rich - standard library.
The downside is of course that compared to Python, Pike is now almost completely unknown. The ecosystem is tiny, etc. We really sucked at marketing the language in the early critical days and then after a while kind of gave up and focused on using it to build commercial systems instead.