Michael Hicks is doing a series of interviews with PhDs in industry working on programming languages. In his latest post, he interviews Russ Cox and Sameer Ajmani both of whom work for Google on the Go language.
As many of you know, I’m a fan of Cox and have followed his work since his Plan 9 days at Bell Labs. He talks a little about those times in the interview but it’s mostly about Go and his (and Ajmani’s) work on it. Cox’s PhD research was in compilers so joining Google to work on Go was a natural for him. Currently, he and Rob Pike run the Go project jointly.
Ajmani was working at Google when he attended a workshop on Go given by Pike. He really liked the language, started using it, and spent some of his time contributing to it. Eventually he was asked to join the team full time. He works on making the language useful for building the large production systems at Google.
Most of the interview focuses on the design and origins of Go and how it is used at Google. Cox and Ajmani are engaging and make for an interesting interview. Definitely worth a read especially if you’re interested in Go.