[brokencode]

Ok, and what if you realize you want these things a million lines in? Do you still move off of Go?

Generic programming isn’t some fancy research language feature like dependent types. It’s just a bare minimum feature in any modern typed language.

It’s perplexing that after C# and Java both notably shipped without generics initially then added them later that they decided to ship Go without generics.. only to end up adding them later.

[tialaramex]

I guess it's possible that C# and Java taught the wrong lesson (you can add this later) and that actually reduced the impetus to ensure Go shipped generics in 1.0

It is also entirely fair to say there's a lot of complexity here and so there's a risk you exceed your complexity budget which for Go as I understand it was very slim. It is a possible a Go 1.0 with more generics doesn't take off because too many people bounce off the extra complexity and so a decade later it's an obscure thing Google made once that has a few fans but not much adoption.

Or that extra complexity means Go 1.0 ships five years later, after Rust 1.0 has given people an appetite for better performance and better safety and its sharpest corners have already been knocked off.

[typical182]

From what I've seen, I don't think the core Go team was ignoring the lessons of Java or C#.

Here's a sample quote from Russ Cox from 11 years ago on this site: [1]

We have spoken to a few true experts in Java generics and each of them has said roughly the same thing: be very careful, it's not as easy as it looks, and you're stuck with all the mistakes you make. As a demonstration, skim through most of http://www.angelikalanger.com/GenericsFAQ/JavaGenericsFAQ.ht... and see how long before you start to think "was this really the best way to do this?"

And of course, they asked other experts for help, including Philip Wadler (of Featherweight Java and Haskell fame): [2] [3]

We’ve been thinking about generics since work on Go began, and we wrote and rejected our first concrete design in 2010. We wrote and rejected three more designs by the end of 2013. Four abandoned experiments, but not failed experiments, We learned from them, [...]

Last year [2018] we started exploring and experimenting again, and we presented a new design [...] and we’ve been working with programming language theory experts to understand the design better.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622417

[2] https://go.dev/blog/experiment

[3] https://go.dev/blog/generics-next-step#acknowledgements

[danieldc]

FWIW, C# generics are way better (ergonomics) than the Java ones (due to type erasure), so Java waited too much. History is more complicated though for Java, since it was either having some generics vs having none. See [this](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1766...) for a lengthier discussion.

[lilbigdoot]

Yes, .NET had the benefit of coming second and using F#, which was originally essentially OCaml 4 on .NET, as it's testing grounds. Same for Async

I am considering .NET for one of my compilers backends because of the reified generics. .NET can even pass around an object with generic methods that get specialized via JIT at runtime each time it sees a new data type (with reference types sharing implementations). Which also ties back to having true value types

It's a shame it took so long for .NET core to come around because even today the platform carries a reputation for being windows first which hasn't really been true for many years now

[metaltyphoon]

C# was meant to have generics in day one, but it didn’t make the cut and it was introduced on the next version (2.0)

[pjmlp]

People always forget this other post when arguing for the home team.

"They are likely the two most difficult parts of any design for parametric polymorphism. In retrospect, we were biased too much by experience with C++ without concepts and Java generics. We would have been well-served to spend more time with CLU and C++ concepts earlier."

https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...

[typical182]

FWIW, I do remember that quote.

It doesn't seem particularly damning to me, though, especially written by Russ Cox in hindsight. It's almost a truism that if you had spent less time on approaches that didn't pan out and more time on approaches that did eventually pan out, you likely would have arrived at a workable solution sooner.

For example, if the core Go team had spent more time exploring C#-like approaches (as some suggest they should have), it's possible that would have delayed the whole thing.

(btw, consider me a "long time listener, first time caller" -- I pretty much always pause to read your comments while flicking through discussions here, including I appreciate you often bring in historical context, even if I might have a different take, or even if I might have expressed your take differently ;)

[xtracto]

Maybe at some point it may even get the ternary conditional operator or a proper exception handling syntax.

Those things that Golang defenders say "dont make sense" until it's implemented, then 'it always made sense" and of course it's a good idea.

[interf4ce]

I'd welcome the ternary conditional operator but I hope exception handling never gets introduced (at least as I'm used to it from Java, C#, JS, etc.).

Exceptions should not be conflated with regular error handling, especially when they're allowed to bubble up from anywhere. I very much appreciate that functions that can return errors force the caller to deal with them, for the most part. True exceptions can already be thrown with panic, although I actually find it incredibly rare that I need to reach for that tool. I'd argue that when people talk about exceptions they almost always actually want "unhappy path" error handling.

Now, if Go wanted to add a sleeker way to handle those errors, similar to Rust's approach, I'd be very interested. Minimum three lines for every call to a function that returns an error does get a bit verbose, arguably hurting readability. A little sugar could improve readability without making error handling implicit.

[cyberpunk]

So your argument is that they should have gotten it exactly right first time and stuck to their guns?

I mean come on. The Golang team created a useful language people use for building real things — it’s easy to work with especially on large teams, and when the lack of generics turned out to be a pain point in the end (after years of production reality) they understood what the community wanted and actually… added them..

Now what, it’s not good enough?

No one forced you to use go.

No programming language is perfect. I personally find the language has served me well.

And after being so very pro generics myself, i actually find myself not even really using them that much apart from calling the slices module etc which has them under the hood anyway…

[brokencode]

Nope, I’m saying that the language that was seemingly designed with either an ignorance of or disdain for the hard-won lessons from decades of prior programming languages.

There was even this condescending attitude that Google engineers couldn’t understand fancy languages anyway, so they had to dumb Go down.

My criticism really isn’t even about Go itself. Yeah it’s improving, which is great.

My criticism is about this anti-intellectual attitude that has permeated the entire Go community since its inception. It’s like hearing that college is a waste of time from people who never graduated high school.

[inigyou]

my criticism is that if we make every language identical, we might as well only have one language. (C++, obviously)

There is room for a language without generics. There was a language without generics. Now there is not.

[brokencode]

Well here’s the thing on generics. Go always had generics since the very beginning. It’s just that only certain built-in types had them.

Slices, maps, and channels all were generic from day one. Same with functions like append, copy, etc.

Your criticism makes no sense unless you think Go shouldn’t have had generics from the start, which it did.

[metaltyphoon]

I think when people mention generics, they don’t mean builtins from the language but a language construct for generics.

[inigyou]

By that logic C has generics because pointers are a generic type - you can have a pointer to any type you want.

[brokencode]

Sure, lots of languages have some level of parametric type support.

This is just basic programming stuff and not limited to esoteric research languages.

Yet so many in the Go community treated it as some kind of language-ruining complexity.

[pjmlp]

Go only took off thanks to Docker pivot from Python into Go, and Kubernetes from Java into Go, after the respective teams got some Go folks into the project.

The usual RIX approach, followed the whole devops hype cycle that created all those CNCF projects half of which no one in devops space actually knows they exist.

[blandflakes]

And the kubernetes code and APIs still read like corporate Java for years after, too

[improgrammer007]

This. One should never pick a language that regresses in terms of features from the get go.