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You forgot to list the most useful feature of adding generics: people on the internet can no longer say "lol no generics", drastically reducing the amount of garbage comments about Go.


Those comments have now been replaced with "adding generics to Go was a big mistake".


Maybe they will, but they haven't, since this is the first time I've seen that comment. The "lol no generics" was endemic.


It’s hard to be objective because of filter bubbles, but I’ve seen it a lot on Reddit last.


*lately

It pops up on /r/golang sometimes. I don’t think it gets taken super seriously but there’s usually at least someone bringing it up.


They'll never go away, it just morphed into "Go was wrong and finally learnt the lesson that Java 5 did 19 years ago by adding in generics".

Go showed that useful software could be written without user-level generics. I don't think any other language today would dare to do that. In fact most languages seem to be converging into the same thing.


We already knew how to write useful software without user-level generics, we have been doing it for decades since FORTRAN came to be in 1957, no need for Go to prove anything beyond the stubbornness of its designers.


Useful software can also be written in asm and we have the entire early software industry to demonstrate that.

That's not the same as it being a good idea


Go is about productivity. It allows writing, extending and maintaining big codebases with lower efforts comparing to assembly or some other programming language out there. This is because of simple "what you read is what you get" syntax without implicit code execution. Generics break this feature :(

Of course, there are other brilliant features in Go ecosystem, which simplify writing and maintaining non-trivial codebases in Go - tooling, standard library, fast compile times, statically linked binaries, etc.


Except that these people now pollute the Internet with freaky packages, which use generics in esoteric ways :)


But if adoption is “very low”, then it’s not much pollution, is it?




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