
GopherCon Singapore 2019 Videos - ValentineC
https://engineers.sg/conference/gopherconsg-2019
======
enriquto
Every time these things appear I feel very happy because it seems that the
gopher protocol has finally returned! Then I click on the link.

~~~
sagichmal
Every time an article about Go is posted to HN, I feel optimistic that people
have finally given up making the same bad joke about a thirty years obsolete
protocol that happens to share a similar name. Then I click on the comments :(

~~~
pigeons
The thing is that its not a joke, that's truly what we think when we see these
headlines. And at least for me sometimes they are about the gopher I'm
interested in.

~~~
sagichmal
> The thing is that its not a joke, that's truly what we think when we see
> these headlines.

I'm sorry, but this isn't believable. In the general context of technology,
"Go" and "Gopher" have unambiguously referred to the programming language for
a decade now.

~~~
jolmg
Nah. It's also not a joke for me. It's literally my first thought.

Maybe what you say is true in social circles specific to the Go language, but
it's not unambiguous outside of that.

HN often refers to technologies that more mainstream communities might refer
to as obsolete, but it's not so for us. There are active Gopher servers _right
now_ , and surely a community that still uses them.

I believe there is also a rising interest in Gopher among people that believe
that HTTP has become far too bloated.

From a quick search, here's a blog post from February of _this year_ of
someone that decided to also host their website via Gopher:

[https://petermolnar.net/gopher/](https://petermolnar.net/gopher/)

He even mentions how he was inspired by an HN post of 3 months ago that talks
about the Gopherspace:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885)

~~~
sagichmal
Your "rising interest in Gopher (the protocol)" is a handful of enthusiasts.
Maybe if you tried really hard, you could identify two dozen of them. There
are over half a million Go programmers in the world.

~~~
jolmg
I really don't like that attitude where everything that's not mainstream
should just die. It takes effort to be outside the mainstream. It makes it
worse that the reason is simply because a monopoly-sponsored language wanted
to use the name for a mascot for their language. Of course a language
sponsored by Google is going to be popular. As _the_ most powerful marketing
company in the world, they have the power to rub whatever they want on all our
faces.

Linux was only for handfuls of enthusiasts. The *BSDs were for a handful of
enthusiasts. Plan9 is still only for a handful of enthusiasts. I guess they/we
should all just disappear or submit to just using Chrome on Windows and
programming everything as webapps in Javascript, right?

I'm not really a user of Gopher, but I appreciate anything that helps
alleviate the insane Internet monoculture that we have right now, where the
Internet is becoming synonymous with the Web and where it's very likely if not
done already that world laws will be written with only the Web in mind.

~~~
sagichmal
> I really don't like that attitude where everything that's not mainstream
> should just die.

I'm not being normative i.e. trying to persuade you that Gopher _should_ die,
in my opinion.

I'm being descriptive i.e. describing the world in which we live where Gopher
_is_ dead.

~~~
jolmg
Gopher will be dead when there are no Gopher servers left online and when
installing a Gopher client takes substantially more effort than any other
package. Right now, Gopher clients are in official repositories. All I need to
install one is:

    
    
      sudo pacman -S elinks
    

and all I need to visit one is:

    
    
      elinks gopher://gopher.meulie.net

~~~
sagichmal
> Gopher will be dead when there are no Gopher servers left online and when
> installing a Gopher client takes substantially more effort than any other
> package.

This is an impractical definition of "dead".

------
ra7
YouTube playlist: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq2Nv-
Sh8EbYBYteOWx9r...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq2Nv-
Sh8EbYBYteOWx9rNuy0JSF8mzsu)

