[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.