[leshow]

I'm well aware when they are useful, I've been using them in languages for the past 10 years. By the same token though, leaving type parameters out of the language has had far reaching implications outside of this "narrow" situation (I'll put forth that implementing a data structure isn't a narrow situation). Error handling and the lack of sum types also seem particularly egregious and are heavily influenced by the lack of generic types.

> Having said that, I honestly don’t know if generics are a net positive or not. What I can say is that go is one of the few languages where I can jump into an arbitrary go code base and make sense of it relatively easily. Risking that is a scary proposition for me.

I don't see how type params would make this harder, I daresay I can think of a lot of instances it's much easier. The caveat is that you simply don't understand them, in which case it's a good thing to learn as many languages do have them.

In any case all these arguments are well trodden so I'm probably wasting my breath re-hashing here.

[jshen]

I’ve been using them for the past 30 years and have come to a different conclusion. You have plenty of languages that do what you want. I hope go doesn’t lose what made it different

[leshow]

Oh sorry, you were saying lack of generics were the reason you could make sense of code easily, implying that if a language has generics you can't make sense of it. That seems juxtaposed to having used them for decades. In any case I can tell you're passionate about this so I think we can just agree to disagree.

That said I don't think there's much "hope", from the looks of things it is coming to Go.

[jshen]

I'm hoping that Go still keeps it's relative simplicity. It's lack of inheritance gives me hope that generics won't be as complicate as it is in other languages.

I understand generics well, I just find code bases that use a lot of abstractions harder to read than Go.

[takeda]

You know? Original Java was a fairly simple language :) Generics were added in 2004 in J2SE 5.0.