Comment by phplovesong
15 hours ago
Im pretty sure it came from the MLs, where you usually have a/b/c instrad of the T,U etc combo.
I dont find it confusing, as its pretty clear that it only an placeholder.
In generics the name usually does not matter or is REALLY hard to name so that it makes sense.
More specifically in Go where you have interfaces, concrete types and generics.
Fairly sure it would predate even that, and go all the way to lambda calculus, and predicate logic before that, and that's where my knowledge stops and somebody else can tell us where the current conventions around variables in logic and mathematics come from.
In ocaml (and I assume SML) it helps that the generic types have a `'` before them, so