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

[Paulo Pinto]

Am 20.02.2014 19:21, schrieb 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.

Not really, it is called structural typing in the ML family of languages.

>
> 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.


I used common base object in Turbo Pascal, C++, Oberon(-2), Java and C#,
before the said languages got any form of generics.

I don't miss those days.



--
Paulo