Thrilled by the announcement (blog.golang.org) of the portable #golang cloud APIs, but I feel the hard-fought lessons and wins from portability are being forgotten.
It was an immeasurably great improvement when my code would run anywhere, unedited. Unix and C pioneered that (really dmr and scj).
But now there are a million incompatible Unix variants and clones.
SQL is a standard that isn't.
And so on and so on.
We're back in the model of differentiation by difference, incompatible difference. I think it's really hard to see how much that loses, how much that costs.
Ironically, I think it's Unix's success, making hardware variance irrelevant, that pushed portability out of people's minds, to our great detriment. Eternal vigilance is required.
So kudos to the Go folks for their attempt at addressing that. (Not my work, don't thank me, although I've wanted this for ages.)
And to everyone here: Push for portability, please.
Things should just work.
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