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>nobody would force you to use generics Yes and no. In a couple years, a Go developer gets hired at a shop and realizes on the first day "oh snap, these peopl

>nobody would force you to use generics Yes and no. In a couple years, a Go developer gets hired at a shop and realizes on the first day "oh snap, these people have a years old codebase that uses generics everywhere and I'm stuck with it." Is he being forced to use them? Can he leave if he cares more about generics than his paycheck? Sure. Can you withold the combo to your safe from the home invader if you care more about what's inside it than your daughter he's pointing a gun at? Sure. I don't think it's incomprehensible that GP prefers that a language remain simple and opinionated for the sake of what one might call "cross-developer" code. Someone up the thread a ways mentioned 1980s C++, object oriented C++ and functional C++ as examples of how disjoint different styles of a single language can be when its building blocks allow it to be sufficiently flexible/agnostic. Another example that comes to mind is Lisp, where its ability to create macros and abstractions mean a developer can, if he chooses, essentially write his own language per project (as far as its legibility to newcomers is concerned). C++and Lisp are both powerful, of course. But power isn't everything. Jira is much more customizable and flexible than Trello, but Trello is clearly doing quite well with the small subset of Jira features that a large chunk of the market is satisfied with.

kazinator 10y ago
Indeed, the whole "use only what you think is good" from a programming language is a fallacious argument. Or, at least, it only applies to the lone wolf developer who writes everything by him/herself. Knuth fell into making this mistake in the 1993 Computer Literacy Bookshops interview, in which he responded thus on the topic of C: DK: I think C has a lot of features that are very important. The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation; it solved a lot of problems that we had before in data structuring and made the programs look good afterwards. C isn't the perfect language, no language is, but I think it has a lot of virtues, and you can avoid the parts you don't like. Yes, you can avoid the parts you don't like, if you're like Knuth, working on one program by yourself.

kazinator 10y ago

Indeed, the whole "use only what you think is good" from a programming language is a fallacious argument. Or, at least, it only applies to the lone wolf developer who writes everything by him/herself. Knuth fell into making this mistake in the 1993 Computer Literacy Bookshops interview, in which he responded thus on the topic of C: DK: I think C has a lot of features that are very important. The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation; it solved a lot of problems that we had before in data structuring and made the programs look good afterwards. C isn't the perfect language, no language is, but I think it has a lot of virtues, and you can avoid the parts you don't like. Yes, you can avoid the parts you don't like, if you're like Knuth, working on one program by yourself.