Comparison:
. . . doing both [OS experts also writing programming languages] is akin to an Olympic high jumper also qualifying for the marathon.
By getting readers to imagine the unlikely possibility of an Olympic high jumper also qualifying for the marathon Sheon Han--switching Olympic seasons and sports--slaloms through a variety of other metaphors (see context below for a full accounting) to help us understand both current programming languages and OS development.
Context:
If I were to categorize programming languages like art movements, there would be mid-century utilitarianism (Fortran, COBOL), high-theory formalism (Haskell, Agda), Americorporate pragmatism (C#, Java), grassroots communitarianism (Python, Ruby), and esoteric hedonism (Befunge, Brainfuck). And I’d say Go, often described as ‘C for the 21st century,’ represents neoclassicism: not so much a revolution as a throwback.
Back in 2007, three programmers at Google came together around the shared sense that standard languages like C++ and Java had become hard to use and poorly adapted to the current, more cloud-oriented computing environment. One was Ken Thompson, formerly of Bell Labs and a recipient of the Turing Award for his work on Unix, the mitochondrial Eve of operating systems. (These days, OS people don’t mess with programming languages—doing both is akin to an Olympic high jumper also qualifying for the marathon.) Joining him was Rob Pike, another Bell Labs alum who, along with Thompson, created the Unicode encoding standard UTF-8. You can thank them for your emoji.
Citation:
Han, Sheon. “Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language.” Wired, 23 Sept. 2024. Web.
(Illustration courtesy of Bing, Sept. 2024)
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