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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

In my mind, this generics flip-flop will do no good for the long term survival of Golang. One way to view it is as "listening to the community and changing" but I think a change this big signals a fracture more than an evolution.

Think about how much planning and foresight goes into making a programming language, especially one that comes out of a massive top-tier tech company like Google. They deliberately chose not to include generics and (from what I remember when I wrote Go code) spent time + effort explaining away the need for them. Now the decision is being reversed, and it signals to me that they don't know what they're doing with the language, long term. As a developer, why do I want to hitch my carts to a language whose core visions are very clearly not correct or what people want?

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Or alternatively, they took forever to do it not because they don't like generics, but because they are super conservative with design and wanted to do it right.

Is there anything about this proposal that would have been surprising to someone 5 years ago? Anything to show for waiting most of the decade other than a decade lost?

Judging past work by the "obviousness" of the final solution is shallow, juvenile, and dismissive. Every problem is easy when viewed through the lens of of a nearly-complete solution. There have been a wide variety of published proposals for generics in Go [1], each of which seemed plausible but had some insufficiency. Who knows how many proposals were conceived but never left the developer's machine.

If it's so damn obvious/you're so brilliant where's your proposal dated Jun 2010 (your 'decade lost') that "solves" generics?

[1]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292

It is surprising to the people who have been feverishly trying to add generics to Go, with references to their efforts dating back even before Go1.

It may not be surprising to everyone. Trouble is that the people who are not surprised now are the ones who sat back and only watched, preventing their knowledge from making it to the project.

Luckily for Go, a small team of domain experts decided to do more than sit back and their efforts are how the latest proposal was reached.

From very, very early in the project-

"Generics may well be added at some point. We don't feel an urgency for them, although we understand some programmers do."

...

"Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven't yet found a design that gives value proportionate to the complexity, although we continue to think about it."

...

"The topic remains open"

They haven't flip-flopped whatsoever. Now that the language has more thoroughly been fleshed out and community has matured, and various proposals have come and gone, the discussion continues.

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