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

[Russel Winder]

On Tue, 2014-02-18 at 07:45 +0000, Paulo Pinto wrote:
[…]
> 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.
[…]

As far as I am aware, Go is the first attempt to have a strong
statically typed language enforce a duck typing approach to objects at
run time. Go has no classes, so the only generics possible is at the
function level.

The thing here is that those people who are actually using Go for real
problems, are finding ways of using the interface{} construct to achieve
polymorphism for the problems they are solving, Thus the evidence is
building that Go as it is is effective and efficacious without generics.

It has to be said most people who say "how can you survive without
generics are coming from C++, Java, D, C# where the mental model is
generics based. Coming from C, Self, Lisp, the mindset is different.

So the evidence is that the last 20 years hasn't resulted in just one
answer, we are still in a period of interesting work being done both
with and without generics. The analysis that is missing here is what
works and doesn't work with and without generics. We have some evidence
just no final conclusion.
 

-- 
Russel.
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