3 ms·

so, they're asking people who didn't use go because of generics to provide experience reports on the specific kind of problems they encountered when writing go

• giovannibajo1 9y ago
  They are asking people who extensively use Go to help collecting cases where generics would be useful in the context of real world Go programs. So instead of cargo-culting a random generics design from a different language or some theoretical reasoning, they want to make sure to enhance the language in a way that actually solve real-world problems in programs written in Go.
  • bsaul 9y ago
    Wouldn't it imply that they're happy with the current audience of the language, and don't wish to extend it ? nothing wrong with that, though.
    • geezerjay 9y ago
      > Wouldn't it imply that they're happy with the current audience of the language, and don't wish to extend it ? You're assuming that people who have some degree of interest in generics and aren't Go users right now will somehow and for some reason decide to avoid Go just because it lacks generics. It's a silly assumption.
      • bsaul 9y ago
        well not really. I'm saying it could be interesting to ask people that decided not to use go , the reason they choose not to, in order to expand their user base.
        • geezerjay 9y ago
          > well not really. I'm saying it could be interesting to ask people that decided not to use go You're assuming that these people have anything relevant to say, particularly as they present irrational arguments to justify their fatwa on a programming language. Meanwhile, those who are interested in exploring the language and are interested in putting it to work aren't wasting their time with irrational stances on a minor technical detail.
          • cyphar 9y ago
            I use Go quite a lot, and I agree with their "irrational arguments". It seems quite dishonest to pretend that anyone who doesn't use Go because they found it too restrictive to be "wasting their time with irrational stances". It's also quite close-minded. You're right that most Go developers aren't going to go out of their way to write a 5-page dissertation about how generics would help solve a problem they worked around, but that's not a justification for not including generics. The fact you have to write orders of magnitude more code in order to work around a lack of generics is ridiculous, and I find it frustrating every time I have to do it. Will I eventually crack and write a series of blog posts that just rant about every single fucking problem I have with Go? Maybe. But it seems quite unreasonable to only want reviews which effectively must be of the form of a coherent rant.
• qyv 9y ago
  To offer a counter point: I dislike the idea of "I write generic code". I say this because it is one of the prime calling-cards of the over-abstraction, which IMO is one of the biggest (and most harmful) self-inflicted injuries in programming right now. Honestly, IMO, 9 times out of 10 the places that developers use templated-types in order to "write generic code", it is an over-abstraction. The generics end up adding nothing but source-code complexity. I often wonder if the only reason generics get used in some situations is because the standard lib uses them.
  • bsaul 9y ago
    end-user code probably doesn't need generic. The issue is much more relevant for librairie and framework developpers though.