I think this grievance mostly comes from the core language team being reluctant to introduce generics early on[1]. The core team was never entirely hostile to g

I think this grievance mostly comes from the core language team being reluctant to introduce generics early on[1]. The core team was never entirely hostile to generics (although some vocal parts of the Go community were), but they were quite dismissive of their usefulness. I think the arguments about "generics for me but not for thee" came to demonstrate the hypocrisy, when debates got heated and the aforementioned vocal parts of the Go community rose up with their usual Luddite themes of "we don't even need generics or any language feature cooked up by academic eggheads after the 1970s". If we'll be fully honest, every language has irregularities that could be qualified as magic (and I've never claimed otherwise). For instance, Pascal has magical varargs for the builtin Write family of functions and most modern languages with generics (such as Pascal, C and Java pre-1.5) have generic arrays. Modern Java arrays are also reified and unboxed, while other generics are boxed and the type is erased in runtime. Go shouldn't be criticized for having exceptions for some language internals and other types of necessary "magic". My personal beef is with the claim that Go is unique by not having magic, while most other language have "hidden magic". I believe that's utterly and categorically false. My other issue is magic that is non-transparent and not well-documented (or hard to wrap your mind around), like the platform-specific source files in Go and multiple init() functions in the same package. I'm not looking forward to the time Go introduces a target platform that happens to be a common word and mysteriously breaks lots of programs... [1] To be exact, they didn't claim that generics are bad, but that they require expensive trade-offs and I remember one of them (perhaps Russ Cox?) saying that generics are mostly useful for custom collections and this is not a big-enough use case. This rubbed many of us as a little bit arrogant, since the "trade-offs" that were quoted only applied to Java and C++, two of the most atypical implementations of generics. None of the quoted issues applied even to ML and CLU which introduced generics decades before Java and C++ (back in 1970s). https://research.swtch.com/generic https://research.swtch.com/generic