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Frame from OSCON 2010:  Rob Pike, "Public Static Void" Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

OSCON 2010: Rob Pike, "Public Static Void"

20 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2012–2023 score 3
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN uses it as a concise statement of the thinking behind Go's design.

A 13-minute OSCON 2010 talk in which Rob Pike argues about what is wrong with mainstream languages like C++, Java and C#, and presents Go as a response. He discusses verbosity and what lightness means in a language.

“gave this short speech at OSCON 2010 about what's wrong with programming languages, their thinking, and their recent direction” (HN, 2014)

3 recommendations · 5 citations · Talks · intermediate

8 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@james4k Nov 2012 Recommends
on HN thread Go is PHP for the Backend
>PHP is horribly inconsistent, breaks all the rules about programming language design, and is infuriating. Some say that rules are made to be broken. In the context of Go, Rob Pike argues exactly that in this short talk on why they made Go: [this video]
Short talk on why Go was made
@dottrap Jun 2014 Recommends
on HN thread Why is there so much hate for .NET?
"Public Static Void" Rob Pike (Bell Labs, Plan 9, Google Go) gave this short speech at OSCON 2010 about what's wrong with programming languages, their thinking, and their recent direction, with a lot of focus on C++/Java/C#, and how Go was a response to that. [this video] Apple Swift seems to share much of the thinking, and the huge enthusiasm for Swift this week suggests developers seem to at least subconsciously recognize there is a problem.
Short speech on what's wrong with C++/Java/C# and Go's response
@mtrn Jun 2015 Recommends
on HN thread The Unix Philosophy
> I wonder what rob pike has to say about OOP or java, I wish I could listen to it. 12 minutes where Pike talks about a few things, that seem to be wrong in our software world: [this video]
Rob Pike spends 12 minutes on what he sees as wrong in software.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@mseepgood Sep 2012 Cites it
on HN thread Will Go be the new go-to programming language?
Read more
The "Talks and Videos" page ( [link] ) is outdated as well. Here's my personal list: Why Learn Go? [link] Short interview with Rob Pike, OSCON 2012 Get Started with Go [link] Andrew Gerrand A Tour of Go [link] Russ Cox Go Concurrency Patterns [link] Rob Pike, Google I/O 2012 Goroutines, Channels Meet the Go Team [link] Panel (Pike, Thompson, Griesemer, Gerrand, Fitzpatrick, Simons), Google I/O 2012 Computing Map Tiles with Go on App Engine [link] Chris Broadfoot, Andrew Gerrand, Google I/O 2012 Go in Production [link] Gustavo Niemeyer, Google I/O 2012 Go: Code that grows with grace [link] (Contains some audio glitches) Andrew Gerrand Interview with Rob Pike [link] Rob Pike, GOTO Conference Lexical Scanning in Go [link] Rob Pike Cuddle, A Go AppEngine Demo [link] Andrew Gerrand Building Integrated Apps on Google's Cloud Platform [link] Andrew Gerrand, Google Developer Day Japan 2011 Real World Go [link] Andrew Gerrand, I/O BootCamp 2011 Go: it's that simple?! [link] Andrew Gerrand, OSDC 2011 Practical Go Programming [link] Andrew Gerrand, FOSDEM 2011 Writing Web Apps in Go [link] Andrew Gerrand, Rob Pike, Google I/O 2011 Go Programming [link] Rob Pike, Google I/O 2010 Another Go at Language Design [link] Rob Pike, Stanford University Public Static Void [this video] Rob Pike, OSCON 2010 The Go Programming Language [link] Rob Pike, Google Tech Talk
One entry in a list of Go videos
@andrewstuart2 Aug 2017 Cites it
on HN thread Context should go away for Go 2
I guess I'm thinking mostly about the talk Rob Pike gave called "public static void" [1], where he probably describes pretty well what "lightness" means to him, or at least what it meant to him 7 years ago. It seems largely about verbosity. [1] [this video]
Pike describes what lightness in a language means, largely about verbosity.
@bokwoon Jul 2020 Cites it
on HN thread Go is boring, and that’s fantastic
In Go you use the pattern of prefixing enum constants with the enum category to indicate that the enums are related to each other (e.g. StatusOk, StatusNotFound instead of status.OK, status.NotFound). Which is funny because today I came across this quote that "patterns are a demonstration of weakness in a language" in a Go talk [this video] . I wish enums will eventually be implemented, generics are coming after all.
Go talk saying patterns demonstrate weakness in a language.
@mustache_kimono Feb 2022 Cites it
on HN thread “Sustainability with Rust” post misleading about Go
Rob Pike actually defined it exactly this way when it was introduced -- a simpler systems language, in contrast to Java. It's funny -- I actually just watched this video yesterday: [this video]
Pike presents Go as a simpler systems language in contrast to Java.
@Yasuraka Jul 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Austral Programming Language
Reminds me of this talk: [this video] And the quote to go along with it: "I'm always delighted by the light touch and stillness of early programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done. Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who'd have guessed sophistication bought such noise?"
Talk on lightness and verbosity of languages, paired with a quote.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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