First of all, generics is hardly DRY to its extreme. I think that everyone agrees that copying e.g. a balancing red-black tree implementation just to specialize

First of all, generics is hardly DRY to its extreme. I think that everyone agrees that copying e.g. a balancing red-black tree implementation just to specialize it for another value type is a pretty bad idea. So then you either end up with some kind of runtime polymorphism or parametric polymorphism. Some Go users argue that runtime polymorphism is enough, but you often run into cases where you have a func frobber(s []SomeInterface) ... However, you end up having a []ConcreteType where ConcreteType implements SomeInterface. However, you cannot simply pass a []ConcreteType to frobber because the memory representation is different and you have to construct a new slice with the interface type, etc. Also, I don't think left-pad is an example of extreme DRY (though it should be part of a standard library). It's not an example of extreme DRY, because I think a substantial amount of programmers wil implement it incorrectly. As long as many Java-wielding friends still believe that a single char can represent any unicode code point, I have no reason to believe that the average monolingual English-speaking Go programmer will realize that you can't simply do something like: padLen := targetLen - len(str) (BTW, Go's fmt package provides padding.)