But is it an essential feature? I've written a lot of Go code and I'm perfectly fine without generics. It makes my code a lot simpler, no need to abstract everything into Thing<OtherThing implementing Stuff, YetOtherThing<Thingie implementing This or That>>. By the way, C doesn't have generics.
If you really need generics that badly for your use-case, nothing stops you from using another language.
C doesn't have generics. Java has extremely limited generics. In both cases, it means that it's annoying and difficult for me to write a decent math library. I have to choose among making it support only one numeric type, implementing many copies by hand (one for each numeric type), or using some sort of ugly code generation tool - who knows what in Java, the preprocessor in C - to implement all those copies.
Which might not be a problem for everyone, but, for my use case, it's annoying.
(Deliberately avoiding the "generic library of data structures" use case because, while generics are what brought that to most of us (edit - in the world of static typing), it would appear that Go's handling that case just fine without them.)
Maybe I'm missing something, though. On the rare occasion that I write C code, I stick to C99, so I haven't had much occasion to use it.
It's perfectly fine for Go's answer to be, "Go doesn't have generics because generics aren't needed to solve the kinds of problems Go is designed for solving, and we are not trying to be a kitchen sink language here. If generics are something you need, please pick a language that's designed to solve the problems that you're trying to solve."
But that's a far cry from what TFA said. TFA read more to me as, "Go doesn't have generics because generic programming is a half-baked idea that isn't ready for prime time."
For example, it's why F# continues not to have ad-hoc polymorphism, despite many users clamoring for it. I'm inclined to agree with the project's maintainers on the subject. As useful a thing as it is, and as glaring as it is for a modern descendant of ML not to have it, it's hard to see how it could be added without creating all sorts of language warts.
[1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext#ad-hoc-polymorphism
is a quote from the article, and seems to say exactly what you're saying?
"If you're not happy go look elsewhere" doesn't move the needle on the question "Should Go have generic" at all. It's not an argument at all.
As the author explains in the article, I don't think all languages should try to solve all problems perfectly.
Note that this leaves the possibility that a feature should not be in the language, even if it does solve a real problem.
Both arguments do not address whether the language should have a feature or not.
"Not essential" might be recast as a valid argument, but must be rephrased in terms of cost vs benefits of the feature examined wrt the goals of the language.
By the way, C has minimal generics support since C11.