Well... those Bell Labs types were polyglots. They tried a lot of things in a lot of languages. Does that mean that Rob Pike knew about sum types? Not necessarily, no. But it gives you two possibilities.
1. Rob Pike spent all that time at Bell Labs, with all these CS experts, read and wrote all those papers, and never heard about sum types. That's... possible. It's not the way I would bet, but it's possible.
2. Rob Pike knew perfectly well what sum types were, and left them out of Go, because he thought they didn't fit with what he was trying to do.
To me, the second is both more charitable, and more in line with what I think Rob Pike's background and experience would have exposed him to. crimsonalucard obviously disagrees. He seems to think that sum types are so obviously the right thing that Pike could not have possibly not put them in Go had he known about them, and therefore he could not have known. And that is in fact possible.
But it seems to me to better fit with Pike's background, as well as with the principle of charity, to assume that he knew. And still he chose to leave them out.
Now, he could still be wrong. And we can discuss whether sum types are really a good fit for what Go is trying to do. But the assumption that he couldn't have known, or he would have done it the way someone else thinks he should have, is what grates on me.
Please read my initial assumption. In no place did I say he COULDN'T have known. Read it. I literally started the statement with "I think the designers probably didn't know" rather than "I know they COULDN'T have known." There is nothing to "grate" you here. I simply had an opinion and a guess, and you disagreed with it and decided to insult me.
What grates me is the assumption that I said it's 100% true that Rob Pike didn't know what a sum type was. I think it's very likely he didn't know. If he did know then I am wrong. That's all.
That FAQ should have been presented earlier in a cordial and civil way. If you did I would have admitted that my hypothesis was incorrect. Science logic and evidence rule the day and I try to not invest any emotion into any of my opinions. It's hard but I follow this rule. If the FAQ says he knows about it then he does and I am wrong. Instead you chose not to present this evidence and call me arrogant.
There was no need to call me "Arrogant." It disgusts me to hear people talk like this. Either way the GO the language feels awkward in the way it uses product types and does indeed feel like Rob didn't know about them because the sum types certainly do feel more fitting then having a function return a tuple out of nowhere.
I also disagree with the FAQ. Plenty of languages have constraint types that are placed on the subtypes of the sum type. There's no confusion imo. Also note that the previous sentence was just an opinion. Please don't call me arrogant because I have one.
Well, I didn't have the FAQ earlier. I was guessing then.
And I don't see the FAQ as necessarily total vindication of my position. The language team considered sum types; it doesn't mean that Rob Pike did in the initial design. It could be that, after it was kind of mostly formed, they thought about sum types and couldn't find a sensible way to make them fit. Or it could mean that he considered them and rejected them from the beginning. The FAQ isn't specific enough to say.
As for calling you arrogant: You are not the first person who has said, here on HN, that Pike "looked like he didn't know"/"must not have known"/"couldn't have known". Those conversations kind of run together in my mind. As a result, I was hard on you at least in part because others went too far. That's not fair to you, and I apologize.
I also cannot call you arrogant for having an opinion. I also have one - you may have noticed this. ;-)
However, I feel that I should say (and say as gently as I can) that you often sound very harsh on HN. A harsh tone causes many to read your content with less charity than the ideas might deserve. (I am not here trying to defend my interaction in this thread.) And this is not very helpful of me, because if you ask for advise on what, specifically, to change, I'm not sure I can give any. I mention it because you may be unaware of it, and awareness may help.
I can easily see how the previous paragraph could offend you. I am not trying to do so. Forgive me if it causes offense.
> To me, the second is both more charitable, and more in line with what I think Rob Pike's background and experience would have exposed him to.
More charitable to Rob Pike, rather than to the person you're in the the middle of a conversation with.
Anyway "appeal to authority" is not an argument, it's a religion. Our lord and savior, Rob, knows so much that his design decisions are beyond question.
Not only is it likely that, as you say, Rob Pike was aware of sum types, but he did not create Go on his own but it was created by a small team. Someone like Robert Griesemer, who studied under Wirth, would have known about them, if the others hadn't.
I have been using the Wirth languages a lot (Pascal, Modula), and one of the big appeals of Go to me is, that it brings back a lot from those languages to the modern times. The Wirth languages are far to underrated in programming today.
The irony being that most Wirth languages are more expressive than Go will ever be, with the exception of the first release of Pascal and Oberon versions, and the follow up on minimalist design approach with Oberon-07.
When Go came out, I though it could follow Oberon, starting small and eventually reach Active Oberon/Zonnon expressiveness, but alas that is not how they see it.
