Comment by brokencode

3 hours ago

Ok, and what if you realize you want these things a million lines in? Do you still move off of Go?

Generic programming isn’t some fancy research language feature like dependent types. It’s just a bare minimum feature in any modern typed language.

It’s perplexing that after C# and Java both notably shipped without generics initially then added them later that they decided to ship Go without generics.. only to end up adding them later.

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brokencode

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tialaramex  2 hours ago

I guess it's possible that C# and Java taught the wrong lesson (you can add this later) and that actually reduced the impetus to ensure Go shipped generics in 1.0

It is also entirely fair to say there's a lot of complexity here and so there's a risk you exceed your complexity budget which for Go as I understand it was very slim. It is a possible a Go 1.0 with more generics doesn't take off because too many people bounce off the extra complexity and so a decade later it's an obscure thing Google made once that has a few fans but not much adoption.

Or that extra complexity means Go 1.0 ships five years later, after Rust 1.0 has given people an appetite for better performance and better safety and its sharpest corners have already been knocked off.

  • typical182  1 hour ago

    From what I've seen, I don't think the core Go team was ignoring the lessons of Java or C#.

    Here's a sample quote from Russ Cox from 11 years ago on this site: [1]

    We have spoken to a few true experts in Java generics and each of them has said roughly the same thing: be very careful, it's not as easy as it looks, and you're stuck with all the mistakes you make. As a demonstration, skim through most of https://go.dev/blog/generics-next-step#acknowledgements

xtracto  2 hours ago

Maybe at some point it may even get the ternary conditional operator or a proper exception handling syntax.

Those things that Golang defenders say "dont make sense" until it's implemented, then 'it always made sense" and of course it's a good idea.

cyberpunk  2 hours ago

So your argument is that they should have gotten it exactly right first time and stuck to their guns?

I mean come on. The Golang team created a useful language people use for building real things — it’s easy to work with especially on large teams, and when the lack of generics turned out to be a pain point in the end (after years of production reality) they understood what the community wanted and actually… added them..

Now what, it’s not good enough?

No one forced you to use go.

No programming language is perfect. I personally find the language has served me well.

And after being so very pro generics myself, i actually find myself not even really using them that much apart from calling the slices module etc which has them under the hood anyway…

  • brokencode  32 minutes ago

    Nope, I’m saying that the language that was seemingly designed with either an ignorance of or disdain for the hard-won lessons from decades of prior programming languages.

    There was even this condescending attitude that Google engineers couldn’t understand fancy languages anyway, so they had to dumb Go down.

    My criticism really isn’t even about Go itself. Yeah it’s improving, which is great.

    My criticism is about this anti-intellectual attitude that has permeated the entire Go community since its inception. It’s like hearing that college is a waste of time from people who never graduated high school.

    • inigyou  28 minutes ago

      my criticism is that if we make every language identical, we might as well only have one language. (C++, obviously)

      There is room for a language without generics. There was a language without generics. Now there is not.

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