[CamouflagedKiwi]

They didn't say they never wanted to do generics, but that they did want to take their time and do them right.

Debatable how much they have been "right", although this gets them somewhat closer. And I think they have not been "wrong" in the ways they wanted to avoid (they referenced some issues with Java generics as prior art, although I forget the details).

[tines]

From another commenter here:

> The post quotes the Go FAQ as saying, "we do not anticipate that Go will ever add generic methods".

[jimbokun]

> “What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’ “ ‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went. “Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go. “Which of the two did what his father wanted?” “The first,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes and the Go language maintainers are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.

https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/MAT.21.28-31

[tines]

Whether they made a good decision or not, or changed their mind or not, is beside the point (I think they did, and they did!). I was merely replying to the claim that

> They didn't say they never wanted to do generics, but that they did want to take their time and do them right.

[skywhopper]

Is anyone actually mad about this, or do people just bring it up to stir the pot? Who cares what the FAQ says? They've worked out a way to add it easily in a backwards compatible way that can solve some problems. They had not identified this solution at the time they wrote the FAQ, and Go has been perfectly usable without this feature for 16 years.

[tines]

I'm not mad, I'm a proponent of stronger type systems. I'm just correcting the record about

> They didn't say they never wanted to do generics, but that they did want to take their time and do them right.

[piekvorst]

What’s the correction? The two claims are not in conflict. Saying “we don’t expect to ever add X” is not equivalent to “we never wanted to add X.” It simply means that they didn’t think it would happen, which can coexist with an underlying willingness to consider it if a suitable approach appeared.

[tines]

You added the word "want", the OP said "need". "We don't ever expect to add X" implies "we don't think we need X."

[foldr]

Clearly we don’t need this feature. Just because the Go team decides to implement a feature doesn’t imply that they must think that the language needs the feature. You’re searching for contradictions where none exist.

[stouset]

We care that time and time again, when anyone ever brings up a criticism of the language, they’re told that everything is just fine and it’s not a problem and we just don’t get the Go Philosophy. There’s not a problem, stop trying to make Go like every other language, and changing things would make the language more complicated and worse.

Then when the language is inevitably changed for the better, resolving the complaint, suddenly it was always going to happen and it was just a matter of getting the details right.

Every other language community I can think of is more than willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of their language. “Yeah, this kind of sucks in principle but it’s not something that gets in the way in practice” is a fine perspective. So is “this was a tradeoff; we went in this direction and these are the resulting downsides”. But the golang community practically trips over themselves to constantly argue that obvious shortcomings in the language are actually a good thing and we just don’t get it.

Nobody is saying the language shouldn’t improve. We’ve all been begging the language to improve. But we’re also tired of the constant, obvious, and shameless gaslighting from the community whenever things do get better. You aren’t going to like the comparison, but it’s extremely Trumpian.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yeah, I worked with a guy in the late 2010s - one of the most painful people I've ever worked with - who would tell anyone that would listen that Go (as it was in 2018) was the perfect programming language - it had all the features you'd ever need - no more, no less. It doesn't need generics, the package management story is fine etc. Thankfully he's been out of my life for a long time now but I believe he's still writing Go, and I bet that he's telling anyone that will listen that Go (as it is in 2026) is the perfect programming language and that its implementation of generics was necessary and perfect etc.

He wasn't the only one but he certainly took it to the extreme.

[piekvorst]

This is an outlier. The Go team and community never endorsed that. In fact, their position has always been the opposite. To give just one example, see [1].

[1]: https://research.swtch.com/dogma

[stouset]

I think it’s pretty clear this post was a response to the clear dogma within the community.

> But we need help from everyone. Remember that none of the decisions in Go are infallible; they’re just our best attempts at the time we made them, not wisdom received on stone tablets.

[the_gipsy]

You just can never trust what the go team says.

[Matl]

Yeah, because software is not meant to evolve and people are not meant to either.

[the_gipsy]

You're not meant to gaslight about the evolution of software.

[kunley]

You're not meant to apply poor man's psychology everywhere just because you have heard about a certain psychological term.

[array_key_first]

Changing your mind is not gaslighting, people just change their mind sometimes.

[foldr]

But they haven’t added generic methods, really. This change just lets you use method syntax in cases where you could have used a function. It’s a pretty conservative change that I think a lot of people here are misunderstanding. Actual generic methods wouldn’t really make sense (for the same reason that you have similar restrictions on dynamic trait implementations in Rust).

[Ferret7446]

There's a critical difference between "we don't think we will add it" (what you quoted) and "we won't add it because we think you don't need it" (what OP claims)

[thayne]

Depends you who "they" is. If you mean the go development team, then yes, they said they wanted to "take their time and do them right"¹. But there are many "gophers" who did say that there was no need for generics, and that it shouldn't be added to the language.

¹ I would argue that it is really, really hard to add generics to a language after it has already matured, and still "do it right" than to add it in the beginning. At least if you care about backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility adds a lot of constraints to your generics system that will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal design. And you will be stuck with a standard library, and a lot of existing ecosystem code that would benefit from generics, but don't because generics didn't exist when they were written. This is a lesson I wish go had learned from Java's generics.

[someone_19]

I agree that they were clearly not in a hurry. I disagree that they are doing everything right. I am interested to see how they will fix the 'million dollars mistake'.