[apta]

> I think the worst part is really our natural aversion to code duplication and the ugliness of it. e.g. having to write min/max for integers is pretty ugly

Sometimes ugliness is a sign that something is designed incorrectly, especially if the language aids in making that more visually evident.

> (although not as ugly as converting your ints to float64 and using the stdlib min/max.)

Not to mention incorrect.

> it's ugly, but programming is not art, it's engineering

Not mutually exclusive. A good language would make incorrect or inefficient code "ugly" or "uglier" than correct code.

> and Go is a language for engineers.

So are languages with generics like C++, Java, Rust, Haskell, etc.

[pmontra]

Plus all those dynamically typed languages which are intrinsically built on the concept of generics (JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby). /sarcasm Nobody uses them because nobody needs generics.

[tel]

They are intrinsically built atop generics. Duck typing is row polymorphism. Dynamic languages often depend upon that flexibility to operate—and they enable it by allowing everything. Static languages without polymorphism are at a low point in that trade-off space since they restrict useful operations and provide no way to express the invariances needed to recover that flexibility.