On: Building a Better Go Linker

[jbarham]

Imagine what Ken Thompson could have accomplished if he hadn't made all those poor design decisions!

And yet hundreds of thousands of working programmers around the world are productively using Go while still continuing to ignore the supposedly superior solutions.

[affyboi → jbarham]

Mass adoption doesn't necessarily mean something is superior. For all the software that's written in Go, there's plenty more written in C++

[pjmlp → jbarham]

Imagine how famous he would be if Bell Labs had been allowed to sell UNIX instead of giving its source code away with a symbolic price.

Hundreds of developers used Basic, Pascal, C, Modula-2, Assembly, Forth productively.

Maybe we should have kept using them, instead of coming up with programming languages that require a PhD. /s

[apta → jbarham]

Appeal to authority fallacy. People still use C, what's your point? There are superior options, but people are either (1) forced to use something inferior, or (2) don't know any better (especially if they drank the kool aid).

[jbarham → apta]

> people are either (1) forced to use something inferior, or (2) don't know any better

Here's another fallacy for you: false dilemma.

[schrodinger → jbarham]

I agree with you and am nitpicking only for my own knowledge: isn’t it “False “Dichotomy”?