[Fwd: Re: [go-nuts] Re: Generics false dichotomy]

[Paulo Pinto]

On Tuesday, 18 February 2014 at 06:50:36 UTC, logicchains wrote:
> On Tuesday, 18 February 2014 at 05:11:00 UTC, Jesse Phillips 
> wrote:
>> Of course, implementing generics isn't going to be enough for 
>> me. It is just an indicator. You are correct that they will 
>> want to get the implementation correct and avoid ruining "Go" 
>> as we know it; that just means they'll avoid all the other 
>> positive things I enjoy about D's templates and 
>> meta-programming features.
>
> Maybe it'd help things if they just directed any inquiries 
> regarding generics to the most popular preprocessor package? 
> There are a few around the community. I even wrote a tiny one 
> myself this morning; it can only handle simple functions like:
> func myFun<T, S>(a, b ~T, u, v ~S) (~T, ~S, ~S){
>     return a + b, u*u, v*v
> }
>
> Nothing like D's capabilities, but it's enough for most of my 
> needs. What's the problem with just using an unofficial 
> preprocessor for generics? If one package became popular enough 
> amongst the community, that might be enough to convince the 
> devs to adopt it when Go 2.0 comes around.

It is like traveling back in time when parametric polymorphism 
was debated in university papers and everyone was inventing their 
own code generation tool.

Back to mid-90's compiler technology when only Ada supported 
generics, C++ started to adopt some form of genericity at ISO 
meetings and everything else where academic languages like 
Eiffel, Modula-3 or Standadard ML.

We are in 2014, not in the early 90's. So to ignore what happened 
in mainstream language design in the last 20 years, is nothing 
more than an opinionated political decision against generics.

--
Paulo