[theshrike79]

People want generics because they think every language should have generics.

What they don't know is the exact cases where the lack of generics causes a real-world problem for them. This is what the developers are requesting at the moment, in order to possibly bring generics to Go 2.

[erik_seaberg]

Every statically-typed language needs generics to allow a function to be used with more than one type. Otherwise you throw away most of the type info and end up with the same problems dynamically-typed languages have.