One year of Go

[Nick Sabalausky]

"uriel_follower" <wasteyourtime at reddit.com> wrote in message 
news:ibjknd$kr5$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Pillsy Wrote:
>
>> jfd wrote:
>>
>> > == Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org)'s 
>> > article
>>
>> > >> eaturbrainz
>> > >> Back in the day I was writing a kernel, and having to
>> > >> rewrite queues for every single type of thing I wanted
>> > >> to queue, or use type-casts to enforce strong typing
>> > >> of queue elements at runtime, was annoying as fuck.
>> > > http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/e49ta/go_one_year_ago_today/
>>
>> > eaturbrainz's problem is what convinced me of the true value of
>> > generics.
>>
>> At this point I'm mystified as to why language designers just keep on 
>> making this same mistake by leaving support for generic programming out 
>> of their statically typed languages. Java and C# had to graft generics 
>> onto their languages after the fact; why ignore that?
>
> Can you please explain when have you missed them? Because after writing 
> quite a bit of Go code, and talking with other people that has written 
> even more Go code, almost nobody has found this to be an issue.
> Specially now the new append() builtin has taken care of most of the 
> remaining cases where generics might have been marginally useful.
>
> Saying "what if" is easy, I'm still curious about in what real 
> circumstances this "ifs" are satisfied, if you have run into any such 
> cases while writing Go code, I would love to hear about it.
> Again, I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but that it is not as 
> problematic in practice as many people that have never used go seem to 
> claim.
>

People who find generics worthwhile *don't use Go*. So of course the 
remaining Go users aren't going to miss them.

> Because nobody ever reused any code in languages without generics!

Sure they did. But they re-use a hell of a lot more *with* generics. (Or at 
least generics that aren't as pointlessly gimped as the C# generics.)