[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.