Agreed. What I don’t get is why people try to change Go all time instead of simply using different languages for different problems. If you absolutely need generics in a project, there are a ton of languages out there that will fit your bill.
I primarily program in Go. While I think often HN makes too big a deal of Go's support for generic types currently being (more or less) limited to slices, maps, and channels (those go pretty far for a lot of programs, especially when combined with interfaces), I don't get the passionate anti-generics attitude this post seems to have attracted either. I'm wary of architecture astronauts just like everyone else, but I think at least the Go team could probably use generics judiciously in the standard library in way that would benefit most programs (like using sync.Map without casting to interface{}, or doing math on float32 without needing to do float32(math.Sin(float32(x))), etc).
In those worlds you're more likely to move data between logical units in JSON or Protobufs (both of which Go is good for) than to need proper generics so I don't understand the push from this subset of the community.
As far as container types and data structures, look at the number of well built storage solutions that don't seem encumbered by the lack of generics at all like: boltdb, bleve, BadgerDB, InfluxDB, etc.
Maybe we could port some of those ideas to other languages so that Go programmers will feel at home :)
Fast compile times, already being enjoyed by many with Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS, or Object Pascal for Mac OS, among other languages with similar support for modules.
Godoc, javadoc did it first.
Gofmt, indent was one of the first and every IDE has done it since ages.
Other languages already have those ideas.
You rarely know all of your requirements up front, and walking back a language change a year or more into your project is almost always prohibitively expensive. At that point, you find yourself with a handful of equally-bad language-hybridization options. One of Go's objectives is scalability--as Go projects mature, they should not find themselves boxed in by the language. In the case of generics specifically, you have a slightly better option than language hybridization or changing languages outright which is generating generic code, but that's only slightly better (because now you need code generation built into your CI/CD pipeline which is inherently worse than a naive generic type system implementation and it also imposes a high cost on all clients of your generic code, since they will also have to adopt your same generic build system as the standard Go toolchain isn't your-generic-build-system-aware).
The generics proposal hints that the design is reminiscent from Ada generics. Well its first standard was released in 1983.