Comment by AaronFriel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AaronFriel | Hacker News Reader

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Go has the unfortunate circumstances of its birth being before widespread recognition of the value of generics and better type systems. Those ideas existed in many languages, and in the PL community, and they were starting to take hold in other languages, but the consensus for most software engineers was that "sum types" are hard and "generics" aren't necessary and the type system should stay out of the way.

I think TypeScript, Scala, Kotlin, C#, and various others I forget now proved that these things weren't a fad and could yield significant gains in productivity and code correctness.

Had Rob Pike been more forward looking (or hired Anders Hejlsberg or Guy Steele to design the language) or dipped further into the PL research, he might have been so bold himself. I don't think anyone can fault him for it, these were niche and minority views in 2010 and may not even be in the majority today.

I think at the same time, we see what happens when a new language has large corporate backing in more recent years. Swift more closely resembles Rust than Go in terms of its type system.

"Generics are useful" was not even remotely a niche view in 2010. That was already 6 years after Java got them, and the lack of generics in Go was a common criticism from day one.

This is such a bullshit argument. Why is it that any go post on hacker news pulls out all the tropes. Lack of exceptions. Lack of generics. Would generics make go a better a language? Maybe. Does the lack of generics make go objectively bad? Hell no!

I've had a long career coding in C, C++, Java, Lisp, Python, Ruby... you name it I've done it. Go is my favorite most productive language by far for solving typical backend issues. My least favorite? Java by a HUGE mile.

> Why is it that any go post on hacker news pulls out all the tropes. Lack of exceptions. Lack of generics.

It's pretty simple -- those of us who use those feature regularly in other languages know how valuable they are, and we miss them when they aren't there.

Why do you dislike java so much?

> Lack of exceptions

Is that really a problem? I think proper sum types to allow Result types that can encode many success/error states are so much nicer than an exception hierarchy. Rust and Kotlin did not go with exceptions, and for good reasons.

> C, C++, Java, Lisp, Python, Ruby... you name it I've done it.

Let me name a few: Rust, Kotlin, OCaml/Reason, Haskell, Elm. These languages carefully selected a set of features, the all have: no implicit nulls and sum types. And in your list non of them have those features. I really wonder what you think of these features when you've worked with them.

> Kotlin

Kotlin very much did go with exceptions except for the Result type in coroutines which wraps a Throwable anyway and is only used for the border between the coroutine runner and the async functions.

It was a common criticism but I don't think it was a majority criticism. Hacker News is not representative of the internet at large, and the idea that Go doesn't need or might not even benefit from generics is still pervasive. (See the first person to reply to you.)

Philip Wadler introduced generics into Java and had previously designed Haskell, so he must have been thinking about types for at least a further 15 years before Java (20 years before Go).

The Go authors acknowledged the usefulness of generics as far back as 2009, shortly after its public release: https://research.swtch.com/generic

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