[krylon]

I have had the need to sort data rarely enough that it has not been a real problem to me (most of the time that data came out of a relational database that did the sorting for me).

But when I did have the need to sort stuff, I have found it annoying. Even C has a more convenient solution for this problem. (Admittedly, Go's sort.Sort can work for data structures other than arrays/slices.)

Like I said, it has not been a sufficiently large problem to really bother me, but it is not a pretty solution, IMHO.

Of course, one might argue that the creators of Go knew that sorting things was not such a common problem for their target audience, and thus they made the trade off to make sorting suck in return for overall simplicity; Go's type system makes it practically impossible to implement a type-generic sorting function like C's qsort(3) without sacrificing performance or making the language more complex.

So maybe that is one of the trade offs we have to make. I still wish for a better solution, even if that may be impossible without turning Go into another C++. And if you like C++, that is totally fine, it has a number of very big advantages. But then you do not need Go to become another C++ if you have the original right there; and even if you wanted to get away from C++ without giving up the benefits it offers, D looks like a more promising alternative.