[pgwhalen]

This argument is getting a little tiresome though, isn't it? It isn't simply enough to call something "non-idiomatic" to gloss over a deficiency. There's a cognitive cost to all language features, but most other general purpose statically typed programming languages seem to have come to the conclusion that the benefit outweighs the cost for some form of generics.

I am by no means a Go basher, it is one of my favorite languages. But I eagerly await generics.

[tptacek]

I could have written this more clearly. The fact that things that are generic over types are non-idiomatic today in Go has nothing to do with whether the upcoming generics feature is good or bad. They're unrelated arguments.

The latter argument is subjective and you might easily disagree. The former argument, about experienced Go programmers being wary when an API is generic over types, is pretty close to an objective fact; it is a true statement about conventional Go code.

[pgwhalen]

That's a fair point. Knowing not to try to write generic code (since you don't have the tools) is the sign of an experienced Go programmer.

That being said, I'm curious how much kubernetes (a large, famous, Go codebase) still has code that does this. I used to read that it used a ton of interface{} and type assertion, but maybe that narrative is out of date (or never really true). I was never too familiar with the codebase myself.