5 ms·

While "fuck generics" might be a low-resolution characterization, it's not entirely inaccurate, and the efforts of Taylor (and perhaps others) notwithstanding,

While "fuck generics" might be a low-resolution characterization, it's not entirely inaccurate, and the efforts of Taylor (and perhaps others) notwithstanding, as long as anyone is writing things like "I don't have in my mind a clear picture of the detailed, concrete problems that Go users need generics to solve," there's reason to believe it's apt enough. As other respondents to the GP comment show, it's not at all hard to come up with that ostensibly elusive picture if you're attending to it. So I suppose the obvious takeaway is that they're still not really attending to it. Which is fine, Go clearly has its niche and its fans, and people who don't want a pretty good Blub have other options.

skybrian 9y ago
This is frustrating. Substituting an insult for politely declining (while leaving the door open) is not "low-resolution" or "apt enough", it's almost entirely inaccurate. Politeness matters.
- wwweston 9y ago
  "low resolution" is a perfectly accurate description of "fuck generics", which like any two-word phrase can't entirely capture the attitude of the golang team, but nevertheless does seem to capture something of gestalt of their approach. Finer resolution would be if fusiongyro had characterized the golang team as saying "fuck off developers who want generics," which wouldn't have been as polite as the phrase "I don't have in my mind a clear picture of the detailed, concrete problems that Go users need generics to solve," but whose semantics are otherwise equivalent.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    No. Unless someone finds a quote, the low order bit is that they didn't use the word "fuck" or any other swear word at all. You can't use the word "fuck" to accurately quote someone who didn't use that word.
    - wwweston 9y ago
      Bringing TOOWTDI from the realm of Python and Go to English, I see. I suppose the argument I'm making does indeed depend on the premise that essential semantics of "fuck" can be conveyed in other ways. If you like, we could explore this by example.
    - cannabis_sam 9y ago
      Take a look at this article/talk https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti... He's explicitly rude. Sets up a strawman argument with the developer who can't imagine programming without generics. Mocks the people who want generics. Gasps in faux disbelief that it could be solved by types. And then, when he goes in for the kill, to show once and for all that generics are pointless garbage: He attacks type hierarchies and inheritance... completely missing the point by conflating parametric polymorphism and subtype polymorphism. I think "Fuck generics" does a decent job of summarazing the rudeness, misinformation and ill-thought out arguments that the article contains about generics.
      - mmargerum 9y ago
        Rich Hickey's Tweet came to mind: If you think you know how I ought to spend my time, come over and mow my lawn while I expound on the problems of dev entitlement culture. I'm fine with RSC, Commander Pike, and those other benevolent dictators continuing to make much better decisions that I certainly ever would and more importantly to be super careful with what they add to the language. I write Swift, JS, objC, and Go. Go is the preferred language because it's simple and I have the entire SDK in my head. I use Go a lot. I can't say i've ever run into not having generics being a huge deal. Let's face it, for most programmers out there, generics is for type safe collections. If slices and maps weren't built into Go then i'd prolly have moved to something else. That said i'd like to see more built in data structures
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >You can't use the word "fuck" to accurately quote someone who didn't use that word. Actually you very much can. It's the perfect word to describe certain attitudes, even if the person didn't use the word. It just translates to "who cares", "we don't need no stinking Generics", etc. It can also convey many other things: http://reallifeglobal.com/how-use-word-fuck/ http://reallifeglobal.com/how-use-word-fuck/
kevhito 9y ago
Counting the weasel words.... 1. "might be" 2. "not entirely inaccurate" 3. "perhaps others" 4. "things like" 5. "the's reason to believe" 6. "apt enough" And that's just in your first sentence. My impression has always been that the Go core team is very open to the possible addition of generics, but also very wary of the very real downsides that generics have. Nothing I've ever seen from Rob or other core team members contradicts that. I'm open to citations if you can give any. In contrast, a lot of Go users and proponents seem to be vehemently against generics, for wildly differing reasons. Some seem to be against them just for the lulz, others for crazy conspiracy theory or obscure philosophical reasons. Me, I miss generics sometimes, but not enough to get riled up about it. I hope the Go folks come up with a clean, simple, and efficient way to get them, but until then I'm happy with the features Go has.
- jules 9y ago
  What are the very real downsides that generics have?
  - Retra 9y ago
    Binary bloat and general difficulties with how one handles variance in light of people's expectations.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - masklinn 9y ago
      > Binary bloat That sure is a concern when just importing fmt increases your binary size from 900k to 1.6M…
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    Even if you don't care about binary bloat (and I do care), it can introduce some of the same problems as dynamic typing. If I am debugging some C++, and I find myself looking at templated function, then I can't easily see what types the template parameters are. Also it becomes hard to navigate to method calls etc. C++ is a particularly bad example, because template metaprogramming is essentially typeless. But any form of polymorphism introduces these problems to some extent. To be fair, that includes the run-time polymorphism already available in Go. Thus if generics allow us to replace some `interface{}` hacks with properly typed middle-men (even if they compile down to `interface{}`) then that would be genuine benefit.

skybrian 9y ago

This is frustrating. Substituting an insult for politely declining (while leaving the door open) is not "low-resolution" or "apt enough", it's almost entirely inaccurate. Politeness matters.

wwweston 9y ago
"low resolution" is a perfectly accurate description of "fuck generics", which like any two-word phrase can't entirely capture the attitude of the golang team, but nevertheless does seem to capture something of gestalt of their approach. Finer resolution would be if fusiongyro had characterized the golang team as saying "fuck off developers who want generics," which wouldn't have been as polite as the phrase "I don't have in my mind a clear picture of the detailed, concrete problems that Go users need generics to solve," but whose semantics are otherwise equivalent.
- skybrian 9y ago
  No. Unless someone finds a quote, the low order bit is that they didn't use the word "fuck" or any other swear word at all. You can't use the word "fuck" to accurately quote someone who didn't use that word.
  - wwweston 9y ago
    Bringing TOOWTDI from the realm of Python and Go to English, I see. I suppose the argument I'm making does indeed depend on the premise that essential semantics of "fuck" can be conveyed in other ways. If you like, we could explore this by example.
  - cannabis_sam 9y ago
    Take a look at this article/talk https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti... He's explicitly rude. Sets up a strawman argument with the developer who can't imagine programming without generics. Mocks the people who want generics. Gasps in faux disbelief that it could be solved by types. And then, when he goes in for the kill, to show once and for all that generics are pointless garbage: He attacks type hierarchies and inheritance... completely missing the point by conflating parametric polymorphism and subtype polymorphism. I think "Fuck generics" does a decent job of summarazing the rudeness, misinformation and ill-thought out arguments that the article contains about generics.
    - mmargerum 9y ago
      Rich Hickey's Tweet came to mind: If you think you know how I ought to spend my time, come over and mow my lawn while I expound on the problems of dev entitlement culture. I'm fine with RSC, Commander Pike, and those other benevolent dictators continuing to make much better decisions that I certainly ever would and more importantly to be super careful with what they add to the language. I write Swift, JS, objC, and Go. Go is the preferred language because it's simple and I have the entire SDK in my head. I use Go a lot. I can't say i've ever run into not having generics being a huge deal. Let's face it, for most programmers out there, generics is for type safe collections. If slices and maps weren't built into Go then i'd prolly have moved to something else. That said i'd like to see more built in data structures
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >You can't use the word "fuck" to accurately quote someone who didn't use that word. Actually you very much can. It's the perfect word to describe certain attitudes, even if the person didn't use the word. It just translates to "who cares", "we don't need no stinking Generics", etc. It can also convey many other things: http://reallifeglobal.com/how-use-word-fuck/ http://reallifeglobal.com/how-use-word-fuck/

kevhito 9y ago

Counting the weasel words.... 1. "might be" 2. "not entirely inaccurate" 3. "perhaps others" 4. "things like" 5. "the's reason to believe" 6. "apt enough" And that's just in your first sentence. My impression has always been that the Go core team is very open to the possible addition of generics, but also very wary of the very real downsides that generics have. Nothing I've ever seen from Rob or other core team members contradicts that. I'm open to citations if you can give any. In contrast, a lot of Go users and proponents seem to be vehemently against generics, for wildly differing reasons. Some seem to be against them just for the lulz, others for crazy conspiracy theory or obscure philosophical reasons. Me, I miss generics sometimes, but not enough to get riled up about it. I hope the Go folks come up with a clean, simple, and efficient way to get them, but until then I'm happy with the features Go has.

jules 9y ago
What are the very real downsides that generics have?
- Retra 9y ago
  Binary bloat and general difficulties with how one handles variance in light of people's expectations.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - masklinn 9y ago
    > Binary bloat That sure is a concern when just importing fmt increases your binary size from 900k to 1.6M…
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  Even if you don't care about binary bloat (and I do care), it can introduce some of the same problems as dynamic typing. If I am debugging some C++, and I find myself looking at templated function, then I can't easily see what types the template parameters are. Also it becomes hard to navigate to method calls etc. C++ is a particularly bad example, because template metaprogramming is essentially typeless. But any form of polymorphism introduces these problems to some extent. To be fair, that includes the run-time polymorphism already available in Go. Thus if generics allow us to replace some `interface{}` hacks with properly typed middle-men (even if they compile down to `interface{}`) then that would be genuine benefit.