[pstuart]

Core members of the language team (Robert Griesemer and Ian Lance Taylor) argued for generics from the very beginning. The team resisted because they didn't know how to do it without sacrificing speed of compilation.

Rob Pike did a lot of defensive work to deflect it but I'll quote him here on the issue when he said "There are no plans for generics. I said we're going to leave the language; we're done":

"I meant there are no plans for generics. That's not the same as saying we plan not to do generics. It just means we don't have a plan."

You take it as a conspiracy against developers when it's really a small team trying to find their way the best they can.

[pjmlp]

You mean how Ada, Delphi, D, OCaml compile?

[pstuart]

And your point is?

They didn't know how to do it "correctly" -- it took outside help from Philip Wadler (who helped with Generics in Java) to make it work acceptably.

Of course the core team were a big bunch of dumb old stupidheads and they made a dumb language for dumb people, so you win, you're smarter than them.

[improgrammer007]

It's an utter waste of time for developers, business, everyone. Millions of lines of Go code have been written without generics. Libraries have been written. Support, maintenance, cost, etc. This is why one shouldn't pick languages that regress in features from the get go. Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib. This is not solving problems. This is doing tech for the sake of doing tech. Wasting everyone's time. Remember that code is not the deliverable.

[wbl]

Nothing was broken in the change: there is no need to migrate.

[pstuart]

I'm confused by what language regression you are referring to.

> Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib

Why? If it works now it works. Refactoring tools exist, and LLMs make this trivial.

You just seem to hate the language and everything about it, and that's your right but I think your arguments are specious and ignore that most language that go mainstream evolve and that comes with tradeoffs (python2 -> python3, rust in general, etc).

And as far as deliverables go, the code is absolutely foundational to that and Go was made to be maintainable by codemonkeys such as myself.

Anyway, the language and the changes noted in the OP apparently aren't for you and that's ok -- there's plenty of languages out there for everyone's taste.

[jppittma]

Claude will migrate your whole repo in an hour.

[kokada]

I assume they will eventually add those to `go fix` too, so you don't even need Claude for the most basic refactors (the more complex ones, sure).

[pstuart]

Likely but it may be asking too much to condense copypasta into generics -- but the tooling does improve on each release.

[9rx]

> You take it as a conspiracy against developers when it's really a small team trying to find their way the best they can.

Especially within a company more powerful than the individuals. The project was done, at least feature-wise, but then Google set it free to become a community-driven project, which opened the freedom to do new things again: https://go.dev/blog/go2-here-we-come