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I went out of my way to make the point without condescension. Evidently I didn't succeed, and I'm sorry for that! Let me put it another way: Virtually all lang

I went out of my way to make the point without condescension. Evidently I didn't succeed, and I'm sorry for that! Let me put it another way: Virtually all languages that have become popular recently have done so because of the backing of some large organization or another. There was a time when languages like Perl, Python, and PHP could arise out of basically nowhere and become popular. That time is gone, and now languages essentially need organizational backing of some kind to succeed. That was true for TypeScript, it was true for Rust, it was true for Swift, it was true for Kotlin, and it was true for Go. They also benefit from some sort of well-known thought leader, a role that Rob Pike plays well. If you think Go would have gotten popular without having a Google and a Rob Pike behind it, then, well, I don't know what to tell you. I don't think Rust would have been popular either without the Mozilla association. Or, more succinctly: I see no world in which Go having simple ML-style generics, without typeclasses or functors, would have made it any less popular. Other factors dominate when it comes to success of a programming language. TypeScript, in fact, shows that you can have generics that are more complex than those of Rust and still become wildly popular.

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tptacek 6y ago
After a week (my first week, to be fair) of hacking on a serious Rust codebase, I'll give you one reason lack of generics might have been a marketing win for Go: I have never appreciated Go's compiler speed more than I do now. But the bigger problem is just that Rust programmers use generics absolutely everywhere (my early impression is you basically can't avoid it, because of lifetimes), and it simply does make everything harder to understand. I know I'm going to be told that if I buckle down all of this stuff will make sense and I'll be fluent with it, and sure, I managed to grok Alexandrescu C++, too. But adding new layers of indirection everywhere just has to impede comprehension; that's always the tradeoff for parameterizing and indirecting! The flip side of this is, I've built some fairly serious things in Go --- a compiler, a couple emulators, a disassembler, a symbolic evaluator; not just the server stuff Go is supposed to be good at --- and I have complaints about Go, but almost none of them are its lack of generics. (There are things I like about Rust! But this isn't the thread for it.)
- benhoyt 6y ago
  What are your complaints about Go? I'm curious to know whether they match mine.

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tptacek 6y ago

After a week (my first week, to be fair) of hacking on a serious Rust codebase, I'll give you one reason lack of generics might have been a marketing win for Go: I have never appreciated Go's compiler speed more than I do now. But the bigger problem is just that Rust programmers use generics absolutely everywhere (my early impression is you basically can't avoid it, because of lifetimes), and it simply does make everything harder to understand. I know I'm going to be told that if I buckle down all of this stuff will make sense and I'll be fluent with it, and sure, I managed to grok Alexandrescu C++, too. But adding new layers of indirection everywhere just has to impede comprehension; that's always the tradeoff for parameterizing and indirecting! The flip side of this is, I've built some fairly serious things in Go --- a compiler, a couple emulators, a disassembler, a symbolic evaluator; not just the server stuff Go is supposed to be good at --- and I have complaints about Go, but almost none of them are its lack of generics. (There are things I like about Rust! But this isn't the thread for it.)

benhoyt 6y ago
What are your complaints about Go? I'm curious to know whether they match mine.