> Why are generics such a critical component of a programming language that every thread about Go mentions it? Personally, I do not feel that strongly about ge

> Why are generics such a critical component of a programming language that every thread about Go mentions it? Personally, I do not feel that strongly about generics; it would be nice to have them, but for my purposes, I can live without them. But still: generic container types would be very nice. I don't need to use it very often, but Go's sort.Sort is very uncomfortable to use. If Go had proper generics, it would be easier to define a "generic" interface to iterate over things - currently, Go's builtin slice and map types are privileged over user defined types. There are probably more issues I cannot think of right now. None of those are deal breakers for me. Go is highly compatible with the way my mind works, to such a degree I can easily forgive it all the things I do not like about it. But I also work in C# from time to time, and seeing how the .Net framework uses generics makes me wish Go had them, too.