| > it finally took convincing Philip Wadler (of Haskell and Java generics fame) to help. Without that lucky break [...] Go probably still wouldn't have generics. Small correction, I think: My understanding is the core Go team was already well on its way to doing generics before Philip Wadler became involved, though he and his colleagues were later very helpful. From Wadler's "Featherweight Go" paper [1] (the first draft of which seems to have been uploaded to arxiv.org circa May 2020): Recently, the Go team mooted a design to extend Go with generics [Taylor and Griesemer 2019], and Rob Pike wrote Wadler to ask: Would you be interested in helping us get polymorphism right [...] and: It took us several tries over many months to formalise it correctly. Well before that, doing generics was one of the main focuses in the GopherCon keynotes/announcements in 2017 and 2018 by Russ Cox [2]. The August 2018 generics design [3][4] was very detailed, and my recollection is most people in the Go community at that point believed the core Go team was going to make generics happen, even if the team and community were still iterating on the exact design. Of course, that design improved over time, including thanks to Wadler and crew, but I think it would be overstating things to say that probably nothing would have happened without Wadler. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.11710v1 [2] https://go.dev/blog/go2draft [3] https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf... [4] https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf... |