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by brandur 3739 days ago
I think the trouble there is just that many other modern languages haven't taken the extreme stance on typing that Go has. It's much easier to learn say, Rust or Scala, than it is to fork and maintain a branch of Go, and there's certainly nothing so special or attractive about Go to tip the balance in the latter's favor.
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The issue with that is that anyone invested in Rust or Scala have no reason to want a better type system in Go. Fixing Go is as important to them as fixing COBOL, and I don't see HN full of threads on what needs to change in COBOL.

What we have here is people who are already heavily invested in Go to the point where its type system is a real problem for them, yet they do not want to fix the problems, even in light of the relative ease at which at least some the problems can be solved (again, if you are willing to accept the tradeoffs).

Check the gonuts archives to see how welcoming the community is to such ideas.
Yes, exactly.

You could fork Go and add generics support, but you'd be maintaining that fork forever. The Go core team would never allow it to go back upstream.

It is rather surprising if not outright shocking that experienced developer get heavily invested in a language when other mature/ better alternatives are there.