Google hopes to remake programming with Go

November 10th, 2009 · No Comments

Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers’ abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go.

And on Tuesday, they’re taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they’ve built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project.

The computing industry is in constant tension between making a fresh start and evolving the current technology. The limits of today’s hardware designs and programming technology led the Go team to take the former approach.

There’s a huge step between creating a new programming language and building into a major force in the industry. Sun Microsystems, which succeeded with Java, has had less success with a would-be Fortran successor called Fortress.

Go also is designed to tackle one of today’s big challenges, multicore processors. Programs often work sequentially, moving through a task one step at a time, but multicore processors are better at handling many tasks in parallel.

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