[_0w8t]

People have been using Basic and similar for ages to successfully implement business logic without generics. What is necessary for business applications is good integration with databases and reading/writing in various data formats.

That typically depends on reflection facilities provided by the language, not genetics. In fact genetics, unless done with extreme care, inevitably makes reflection API more complex. In turn that makes it harder to write readers/writers for typical business formats harming the case of business applications.

[pjmlp]

Basic got generics long time ago in Visual Basic.NET.

I have been coding since early 80's, naturally I have delivered lots of production code without generics.

Oberon, one of my favorite language family and influence to Go, which I used for a while, also did not had generics.

But that was in 1996, when generic programming was WIP in ANSI C++, ML compilers were starting to be adopted, Ada was too expensive, Java and .NET were yet to come.

In 2017 I only use static typed languages without support for genericity when forced to do so.

[zimpenfish]

Isn't there some fact about how COBOL (which I'm reasonably sure doesn't have generics) still handles more transactions and/or more $$ per year than anything else?