I’m not sure about you, but it feels very reasonable to me. It’s not anywhere near the top of my list of pains that I feel when working with Go everyday.
interfaces are a poor substitute for generics, but that's by design. the minute they add a reasonable implementation of generics Go will begin to metastatize into something unrecognizable as people will no longer be bound by the limitations of the already existing core generic types. the core developers really do not want that to happen.
it's a highly opinionated language and for some reason some people enjoy writing mountains of for loops so that their code can remain "simple" as they produce a maze of twisty funcs all alike. i mostly see a for loop or two per func with a map and some slices repeating the same patterns over and over. that's the way the language designers want it.
i work with a lot of go programmers and they are all fine and good programmers. that makes it even harder to understand why they enjoy all the boilerplate and even defend it.
Ignorant here (I've never done database work):
What's wrong with asking the database to do the sorting for you? (assuming you do work that involves a database. Perhaps this assumption itself is the problem?)
I understand why that would make you uncomfortable. ;-)
But to be honest, more than 50% of the cases where I needed data to be sorted in a certain way, that data came out of a relational database, and adding an ORDER BY-clause to the SQL query was so much easier than doing it myself.
I do agree with the second part of your comment in that Go has a certain type of application where it really shines. But that type of application is not uncommon, and when you hit the sweet spot, it really shines.
care to enlighten me? if you have an index you could get the sort for free, also you never pull all results, so why would you pull all, just to sort, on the web I would love to work more in ram, but since you assume a server will crash, you need to save the actual state in the db.
I didn't down-vote, but what jumps out to me is the assumption that you'll generally be pulling data from a database. Yeah, that's almost certainly true in a web-application, but it's not going to be nearly as universal in a systems-programming niche which is where Go appears to be excelling (as perceived by someone outside of the Go community).
So ease of implementing sorting in your core language without making assumptions about the operating environment of code written in that language sounds like a reasonable demand.
This is how you can sort slices of arbitrary types in Go:
https://play.golang.org/p/VHJW9lVY9b
I’m not sure about you, but it feels very reasonable to me. It’s not anywhere near the top of my list of pains that I feel when working with Go everyday.