You can clearly see in the original Go announcement, hosted by Pike, that generics were presented as "not yet". Not "never". Let's not invent facts. It was indi

You can clearly see in the original Go announcement, hosted by Pike, that generics were presented as "not yet". Not "never". Let's not invent facts. It was indicated from public day one that it would get them eventually, even by Pike himself. As we all know, Pike is a bit of a troll, so nobody is surprised that his random musings said that they'll never come. But it also was never his project to decide. He was involved to some degree, and you can recognize his influence, but it's really Ken Thompson's baby. Griesemer was the only founding member young enough to not want to retire after the initial work was done, so it soon became his to oversee. Not to mention that ultimately the project is owned by Google, who is capable of squashing Pike like a bug if he wasn't acting in the interest of the company's assets. Officially, generics were always on the table and would come once a suitable implementation was found. And, guess what? A suitable implementation, after a lot of flawed tries, was found and generics came. Imagine that. Had the open source community wanted generics more perhaps they would have jumped in and helped Taylor where he was struggling to speed up the process, but such is life. Ultimately people don't care, are lazy, and like to make others do the work for them, all while complaining about it the whole way. Google eventually found a domain expert willing to be hired to close the gaps Taylor was struggling with and the rest is history.