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

[Craig Dillabaugh]

On Thursday, 20 February 2014 at 18:22:11 UTC, Russel Winder
wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-02-18 at 07:45 +0000, Paulo Pinto wrote:
clip
>
> 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.
>

I once worked on a project where we used Fortran to develop a GUI
app
(without the help of any sort of GUI toolkit) for image
processing.
I remember struggling to find ways to make it re-use code, but the
general means of code reuse was copy-paste.  I replaced part of
the
tool with a QT based (C++) tool, that had MUCH better
functionality with
a fraction of the code, but the project leader had no interest in
that
because he only knew Fortran (he was a scientist, not a
programmer, so
I can see why he didn't want to change his baby to C++ though).

Anyway, my point is: the fact that we found a way to do it doesn't
necessarily mean that it was a good idea.

How good these Go solutions to polymorphism are, I cannot comment
on as
I don't know Go, but hopefully their 'ways' are more elegant than
our way of writing a GUI app in old-school Fortran.