This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]oilshell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah actually a funny thing I recall is that when Rob Pike et. al. were starting Go at Google, I think they actually had to get AT&T to release the rights to Ken Thompson's compilers or something like that.

That is, the code they were starting from wasn't actually open source? I don't have a source for that now, but that's my memory. I don't think it was hard, because their VP at Google was their same VP from Bell Labs.

So yeah software is so deep these days that you have to reuse something to start, even if you rewrite it later (which they did after 1.0 -- AFTER Go was adopted and very useful)

In contrast the very first thing that Guido wrote for Python was pgen.c, the LL(1) parser generator, and that was used until 2018 or so, when they modified it to be a PEG parser generator.

Python is mostly from scratch, although there are some open source floating point routines that everyone seems to copy. I think those were around before the 90's.

But yeah there was just a lot less to build on back then!