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Comment by readams | Hacker News Reader

This is because using Go feels very much like going back in time to Java 4.

Not necessarily. I think by providing native slice and map types Go reduces the need for generics already by a large margin. Other things that often use generics (higher order functions, future types, ...) are no idiomatic Go which leans more to the imperative way of doing things. In total I have not really missed generics in Go up to now (but I have up to now only written about 20kloc in it) - while I certainly missed them in early Java and C# versions.

As long as your needs are sufficiently basic that you never need to create data structures then what's in Go can be ok. People who are fans of Go seem to be people who don't know what they're missing in more advanced languages. This seems to include C programmers and dynamic language programmers. Programmers used to better type systems are generally not happy with Go.

This comment is patronizing and implies that liking Go makes someone a "junior varsity" programmer, or ignorant of alternative programming models. It doesn't. I'm well-versed in half a dozen other languages, many of which include generics. I like Go just fine. Yes, there are cases where it is not the best choice. That's fine, too.

How much Go have you written, out of curiosity?

> This comment is patronizing and implies that liking Go makes someone a "junior varsity" programmer, or ignorant of alternative programming models.

Because that's the truth and that was intentional at its design.

> I'm well-versed in half a dozen other languages, many of which include generics.

It depends in which languages.

I think I've done things in most well known programming languages that are quite far from basic - from dynamically typed languages up to static typed functional languages. And I'm not a fan of dynamic typed languages.

But I still stand behind my opinion from the parent post: Go's type system is quite primitive, but in combination with the typical way of doing things there it is sufficient for most cases. Whereas other languages need generics a lot more, especially functional languages where monadic types are often used or languages that don't provide builtin list and dictionary types.

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