[uncledave]

Yeah that's ok until you have 20 million lines of generic ridden crapola pumped out by the lowest bidder. That's the hell I spent a good chunk of the last few years untangling on the C# front. Let's model this correctly! Oh no someone said fuck it, lets just use a bunch of generic data types!

Dictionary<List<Dictionary<string, object>>>, SortedSet<Dictionary<int, string>>>>

Several thousand out of bounds, missing keys, null reference exceptions, hash collisions and the hair starts to get thin on top. I'm not even sure I'm happy with it for abstract data types.

Please can we keep Go special.

[travv0]

> Several thousand out of bounds, missing keys, null reference exceptions, hash collisions and the hair starts to get thin on top.

What does any of that have to do with generics?

[uncledave]

Well the generic programming model tends to favour using light weight abstract data structures instead of well defined types. Those abstractions are by nature leaky so many internal concerns leak out of abstraction boundaries into the caller and give them one hell of a bad time.

[cannabis_sam]

> Those abstractions are by nature leaky

Do you have any examples?

[Smaug123]

`Dictionary<List<Dictionary<string, object>>>, SortedSet<Dictionary<int, string>>>>`

This is not a problem with generics, but with C#'s lack of discriminated unions and/or tiny-types. Except what on earth are you doing with a dictionary whose keys are lists of dictionaries? I am quite sure someone has not modelled their domain correctly there. That's not something you can blame on the existence of generics - I shudder to imagine how much worse it could have been without generics!

[swirepe]

> I shudder to imagine how much worse it could have been without generics!

It probably would have just become a very long String pretty early on. It would have xml in it, but not always, because nobody is that lucky.

[uncledave]

I was exaggerating there I admit, mostly because I can't post some of the hell I've seen without breaking contracts. The worst example I've seen was a completely generic data type specified abstract syntax tree. I spent a couple of weeks rewriting that using concrete types and managed to find and fix tens of trivial bugs caused entirely by the design.

The point is really that it's hard to reason about such things and define if they are appropriate or not for a lot of people. It's a lot of rope to hang yourself with.

[a1369209993]

The sufficiently stupid-but-hard-working programmer can write crap code in any language. The actually-useful question is whether the language gives competent programmers enough rope to build whatever they're trying to build.

[marcus_holmes]

I think the answer for that for Go is "yes"

[uncledave]

We shouldn’t build stuff for the 5%

[marcus_holmes]

Agreed. I'll be banning generics from any code I have control over unless there's a very good reason for it. I saw too much of this crap in C#, and ran from it screaming.

[swirepe]

Say you need a binary heap to hold some customer records, and another binary heap to store some orders. How many times do you implement a binary heap?

[masklinn]

Apparently their answer is “five times”.

[marcus_holmes]

Well, twice at least.

I don't know why you're all so scared of a little repetition ;)