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Comment by eweise | Hacker News Reader

Regarding Go, it didn't have generics until recently, partly because some of the community didn't think it was beneficial. They've been nothing but positive in our project as we've been able cut down on substantial amounts of boilerplate in some areas.

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Isn't that the grandparent's point though? Features that other languages have are first considered "not beneficial" and are in fact mocked as being useless or extravagant. Then, once said feature is introduced to one's favourite language, the feature is considered useful and it turns out that maybe those other languages had a reason for including them beyond mere extravagance.

edit: gp, not p

Also known as "the Blub paradox". https://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox

> partly because some of the community didn't think it was beneficial

And partly because it needed more thought. I'm all for more well thought out features, but there's also value in a language that doesn't move fast and doesn't break things. And I say that while Python is my main work horse, so I understand what breaking things mean.

This post from Russ Cox was really insightful to explain that Go's generics and the delay in implementing them were a technical issue, not a political or opinion based one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622417

> We have spoken to a few true experts in Java generics and each of them has said roughly the same thing: be very careful, it's not as easy as it looks, and you're stuck with all the mistakes you make.

The Go team does their homework, and they do it thoroughly. I respect that more than anything about the language. Compare with Java, that had been stagnant in committees for nearly a decade, or with Javascript, that has been bolting on features left and right; I'm mainly thinking of the half-baked OOP addition.

The Go developers, many years before implementing generics, made it clear they were open to the idea. It was more about how it would fit into the language and them agreeing on it.

To their credit, they don't just throw things into the language because it's trendy or "cool" at the moment. Even if people disagree with their decisions, they are well considered and thought about decisions.

It’s funny you call out Java, when it is exactly the language famous for taking advantage of being the last mover — even its original intros mentioned it!

Also, languages don’t start in a vacuum, they shouldn’t have to go through the whole process from zero each time — Go absolutely failed by not incorporating it from the first version.

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