What a Mythical Language Says about Golang – InApps Technology 2022

If you were paying any attention to last week‘s column, you may have noticed one glaring error: Go++ is not a real programming language.

You see, while busy rounding up opinions on Twitter and elsewhere of the latest goings-on in the ongoing development of the Go programming language, I inadvertently stepped into a steaming pile of trolling by Envoy proxy creator Matt Klein, who lists “Go++ steering committee co-chair with @davecheney” among his other, actual qualifications on his Twitter bio, so we referenced this qualification in the post. Well, I come to you this week, red-faced in my inattention to the details, but wanting to share, nonetheless, the wonders of Go++, the imaginary language used, most often, to parody what Klein may see as the mistakes of the growing Go language.

While Go++ may not exist, it nonetheless reflects some heartfelt opinions of Klein, who has previously called Go “one giant sighfest.”

Or, it’s just trolling, but even trolling can offer some insight. We should mention at this point that Klein wrote Envoy in C++…

Perhaps the funniest part of Klein’s trolling efforts, beyond my own gullibility, is the part where Klein’s over-the-top mimicry so closely mirrors the opinions espoused by others… but isn’t that just effective trolling in the end?

And so Go++ soars, indeed. Now, on to the latest news in the world of programming languages and the like.

This Week in Programming

• AWS Brings TypeScript and Python to Infrastructure-As-Code: You’ve heard of the idea of infrastructure-as-code before, right? That’s the one where you, the developer, becomes a DevOps person and starts handling that job, too. Well, Amazon is trying to make that task a bit easier by bringing you the ability to use languages you’re already familiar with, with the general availability of AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), which now supports both Python and TypeScript. AWS CDK is “an extensible open-source software development framework to model and provision your cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages” and was released this week at Amazon’s AWS Summit. AWS CKD gives you the ability to build both your application and your infrastructure in the same IDE and the same language you may be developing in already and is free to use. To get started, check out the step-by-step online tutorial and the repository of CDK example projects.
• AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code: Also at the AWS Summit this week, Amazon also released the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, an extension for the popular IDE that’s now generally available and makes it “easier for the development community to build serverless projects using this editor.” The extension has been around since last November, available open-source on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, and gives developers the ability to “easily develop serverless applications, including creating a new project, local debugging, and deploying your project — all conveniently from within the editor,” with support for Node.js, Python, and .NET. Specifically, the toolkit makes it possible for devs to test code locally with step-through debugging in a Lambda-like environment, deploy to the AWS region of choice, invoke Lambda functions both locally and remote, and specify function configurations such as an event payload and environment variables. Check out the blog post for a full walk-through.

• MIT Intros New PPL for ML: For those of you into machine learning, there’s a new kid on the block – MIT has introduced a new probabilistic programming language (PPL) named Gen, which Intotheblock Chief Technology Officer Jesus Rodriguez describes in a blog post. According to Rodriguez, “the new language allow[s] researchers to write models and algorithms from multiple fields where AI techniques are applied — such as computer vision, robotics, and statistics — without having to deal with equations or manually write high-performance code.” Gen addresses some common challenges in this realm “by leveraging a novel architecture that improves upon some of the traditional PPL techniques” and is based on Julia. This novel architecture “represent models not as program code in a Turing-complete modeling language, but as black boxes that expose capabilities useful for inference via a common interface.” While Gen is certainly not the only game in town, Rodriguez writes that “efforts like Gen are attempting to democratize PPLs in the same way TensorFlow did for deep learning.”
• Get Documenting with Docsy: It’s likely the writer in me, but I find Google’s recent efforts toward making documentation for open-source software commendable, and now the company has announced Docsy, a website theme for technical documentation that’s already in use by Kubeflow, Knative, and Agones. Essentially, Docsy provides “a documentation website with templates and guidance for documentation, which we’re open-sourcing to the public to use and help improve the tool,” because, heck, your specialty is in building software, not creating and organizing publicly accessible documentation, right?

• Ten Years of Erlang: While we’re all busy walking about the latest languages out there, there are languages like Erlang, which has been around for 33 years now, and is “still wedged deep in infrastructure in a lot of corporations,” according to Erlang developer Fred Hebert. Hebert this week offered up a lengthy blog post on his decade of Erlang use, in which he discusses “hype phases and how this related to Erlang, the ladder of ideas within the language and how that can impact adoption, what changed in my ten years here, and […] what I think Erlang still has to bring to the programming community at large.”
• The Languages of the Unicorns: And by unicorns, of course, we refer to those billion-dollar companies out there. Coding Dojo did a little survey and offered some insights into who’s using what. If you’re interested in the horse race that is programming language rankings, give the results a gander. Not surprisingly, Python, Java and Javascript rounded out the top three, with the rest being a mix of other familiar languages you’d expect. They did note, however, that “Kotlin was surprising popular, used at eight of the 25 unicorns,” a first for the language it the company’s analyses. While we’re here talking about language horse races, the TIOBE Index also came out, noting that Perl had hit its lowest popularity ever. Nonetheless, InApps Technology’s Dave Cassel has just begun penning a new series on getting started, at long last, on Perl 6, so follow along if Perl 6 is on your to-learn list.

Feature image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay.