Google GO!
Google have really been turning out the goods over the last few months. I had expected the interim between Chrome (the Browser) and Chrome (the OS) to mainly be work on fixing things, and porting things to various platforms. And yet, they come out and surpassed themselves again and again. Quite aside from the work on the Android powered phones, the release of Google Voice and Google Wave seem to be a great step forward for cloud computing. I unfortunately don't have access to voice as I live in the UK (there are probably ways round this, but I haven't tried, and I'm not all that bothered to by honest - I'm not a great fan of phones anyway). But the release of Google's new programming language, Go, has left me slightly concerned. Mashable, which is where I actually found a link to the Go website, is generally right in saying that "one of the core philosophies of Google, and one of the reasons it has been so successful, is efficiency". But I've got a feeling that any cross-platform byte-code language is going to be prone to slow. I must admit that having garbage collection done for me makes writing things quickly a doodle, and Google's claim that "the resulting programs run nearly as quickly as comparable C or C++ code".
So, why the negativity. It's a language which is based on Java/C style syntax, built up from the base. And it's written by programmers, so it probably makes some sense. But I'm worried we'll have a repeat of the atrocity that was Adobe Air. That language has resulted in some of the most horrible user interfaces. And there are many other languages which already exist, and are well established - would Google's time been better spent developing Java++, or redefining a native-code language - perhaps even creating a non-hacked together C++?
Regardless, true judgement has to wait until I've had time to properly mess around with it. Shame Google's taken away me compile time; it's obvious they don't understand the precious freedom those seconds give me. Clearly their managers are spoiling them