[OT] Go officially won't get generics

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:05:59 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
>
>> Well, he had previously stated that there would be no breaking 
>> changes, and that if there were changes it would have to be 
>> called "go version 2 or something". So when generics were 
>> brought up he stated that there were no plans for generics and 
>> "I said we are going to leave the language, we are done" (with 
>> version 1 semantics).
>>
>> Ola..
>
> Robert Pike says in this thread 
> (https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=de#!topic/golang-nuts/3fOIZ1VLn1o):
>
> "Go has type switches, and therefore no need for the Visitor 
> Pattern.". He has exactly the same mindset as Niklaus Wirth and 
> Oberon never got templates. Future will tell... Would be a nice 
> thing to bet a dime on whether Go will have generics or not. I 
> bet not ;-).

Oberon did eventually get some basic form of templates in Active 
Oberon, but that was not under Wirth's supervision.

He actually went into the other direction by making a minimalist 
version of Oberon with Oberon-07.

I had the opportunity to meet Wirth at CERN, when he and a few 
ETHZ members took part on the Oberon Day, back in 2004.

He is really great guy, but he could not understand why Oberon 
was being ignored in the industry. As he expected the desire for 
quality would drive developers to it.

In a similar vein to Rob Pike writing the blog post why he thinks 
C++ developers don't care for Go, Niklaus Wirth wrote a long 
article about the industry lack of interest in minimalist 
languages.


The problem they fail to understand, or acknowledge, is that 
large scale architectures in simple languages usually lead to 
complex code with lots of boilerplate.

--
Paulo