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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

This is not true. No one says generics aren't required, and it's more about finding the implementation that makes sense for go. For at least a year several people on the Go team have acknowledged the demand for generics. Ian Lance-Taylor even added a doc to the go repo which summarised the entire discussion on the various possible implementations and their pros and cons. For instance, most of what's required could come from a nice implementation of macros.

As usual you, coldtea, have posted an uninformed, polarising comment with the intent to provoke. Not surprised.

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> As usual you

That crosses into personal attack and so is not allowed here.

coldtea is a forceful arguer but stands out in my mind as one of the users who has done the most to improve the quality of their comments (and thus HN) over the years by becoming more civil and substantive. Admittedly Go+generics isn't likely to hit any peaks of either civility or substantiveness.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13803300 and marked it off-topic.

>This is not true. No one says generics aren't required

Actually many have maintained exactly that, here on HN. Do you want me to post excerpts of such comments?

Heck, from this very thread: "I admit that I missed generics for the first several weeks but then just moved forward. Nowadays I don't really think I actually need them anymore."

>For at least a year several people on the Go team have acknowledged the demand for generics. Ian Lance-Taylor even added a doc to the go repo which summarised the entire discussion on the various possible implementations and their pros and cons.

I've read the summary, and most of the related blog posts. It has been close to a decade of Golang now. At which point can no practical progress in an area finally be considered as a neglect of indifference? After 7-10 more years?

Besides, regarding the acknowledgement I've posted sometime ago that I consider the standard "Generics are difficult, we just want to make sure we create them perfect before we attempt at adding them" position of the team as a discussion-stopper more than anything else. Perhaps you have some reason why I should be disallowed to be of and express that opinion? Because you don't seem satisfied to point that you consider it wrong.

>As usual you, coldtea, have posted an uninformed, polarising comment with the intent to provoke. Not surprised.

My intent is to express my position on the issue. Which is more or less the same, all these years, and I'm not sure why you'd expect that it should change, or that people who disagree with you should just shut up or something.

Plus, I don't care for your ad hominem.

>It has been close to a decade of Golang now.

It's been ~7 years, so there's still two more years before it reaches the amount of time it took Java to get generics.

I'm confident generics will come to Go (I sure hope so), but even if it doesn't, Go's impressive uptake shows that it's not something it desperately needs in order to be a successful language.

How much uptake would Go had if it was done at company XYZ?

Or Docker guys hadn't used it?

Impossible to answer, how much would uptake would C# have had without Microsoft behind it pushing it HARD (MUCH more than Google has promoted Go), how much would Swift have had without being pushed hard by Apple as the new native language to replace ObjectiveC etc ?

That is exactly my point, it would have been probably a footnote in programming languages compendium.

Case in point, how interested were people in using Limbo?

>That is exactly my point

The point being that unless you have a huge rich company behind you, you will remain a footnote ?

Without that or a kind of killer application, e.g. Rails, yes.

Too little. Which probably goes to show that uptake doesn't prove much.

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