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Core members of the language team (Robert Griesemer and Ian Lance Taylor) argued for generics from the very beginning. The team resisted because they didn't kno

by pstuart 2mo ago

Core members of the language team (Robert Griesemer and Ian Lance Taylor) argued for generics from the very beginning. The team resisted because they didn't know how to do it without sacrificing speed of compilation. Rob Pike did a lot of defensive work to deflect it but I'll quote him here on the issue when he said "There are no plans for generics. I said we're going to leave the language; we're done": "I meant there are no plans for generics. That's not the same as saying we plan not to do generics. It just means we don't have a plan." You take it as a conspiracy against developers when it's really a small team trying to find their way the best they can.

improgrammer007 2mo ago
It's an utter waste of time for developers, business, everyone. Millions of lines of Go code have been written without generics. Libraries have been written. Support, maintenance, cost, etc. This is why one shouldn't pick languages that regress in features from the get go. Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib. This is not solving problems. This is doing tech for the sake of doing tech. Wasting everyone's time. Remember that code is not the deliverable.
- pstuart 2mo ago
  I'm confused by what language regression you are referring to. > Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib Why? If it works now it works. Refactoring tools exist, and LLMs make this trivial. You just seem to hate the language and everything about it, and that's your right but I think your arguments are specious and ignore that most language that go mainstream evolve and that comes with tradeoffs (python2 -> python3, rust in general, etc). And as far as deliverables go, the code is absolutely foundational to that and Go was made to be maintainable by codemonkeys such as myself. Anyway, the language and the changes noted in the OP apparently aren't for you and that's ok -- there's plenty of languages out there for everyone's taste.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- jppittma 2mo ago
  Claude will migrate your whole repo in an hour.
  - kokada 2mo ago
    I assume they will eventually add those to `go fix` too, so you don't even need Claude for the most basic refactors (the more complex ones, sure).
    - pstuart 2mo ago
      Likely but it may be asking too much to condense copypasta into generics -- but the tooling does improve on each release.
- wbl 2mo ago
  Nothing was broken in the change: there is no need to migrate.
pjmlp 2mo ago
You mean how Ada, Delphi, D, OCaml compile?
- pstuart 2mo ago
  And your point is? They didn't know how to do it "correctly" -- it took outside help from Philip Wadler (who helped with Generics in Java) to make it work acceptably. Of course the core team were a big bunch of dumb old stupidheads and they made a dumb language for dumb people, so you win, you're smarter than them.
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    Fast compilers with generics wasn't rocket science. Of course the language is for dumb people, Rob Pike even said it officially, poor souls that apparently cannot master better tools, even though they are able to work around Google's stupid hiring practices.
    - pstuart 2mo ago
      It would be a mistake to confuse simple for dumb. His comment about making it easy for junior engineers was about pragmatic software engineering and being able to deliver product at scale. There's plenty of far more advanced programming languages, e.g., Lisp, OCaml, Haskell, and even C++ as far as power of the language. But only one of those has gone mainstream and it was the C++ compilation time that inspired Go and Rust was also trying to be a better way to code within that paradigm. It's a matter of taste, and while hating being forced to use a language you don't like to use is one thing, hating the language itself is silly -- it's like hating roses because you like orchids. And if you think the original Go team was composed of dumb people you are also mistaken. They built a language they wanted to use, which I'd posit is a signal of "worthiness". Many people (including myself) enjoy using the language and it's created a lot of value in the software ecosystem.
9rx 2mo ago
> You take it as a conspiracy against developers when it's really a small team trying to find their way the best they can. Especially within a company more powerful than the individuals. The project was done, at least feature-wise, but then Google set it free to become a community-driven project, which opened the freedom to do new things again: https://go.dev/blog/go2-here-we-come https://go.dev/blog/go2-here-we-come

by pstuart 2mo ago

improgrammer007 2mo ago

It's an utter waste of time for developers, business, everyone. Millions of lines of Go code have been written without generics. Libraries have been written. Support, maintenance, cost, etc. This is why one shouldn't pick languages that regress in features from the get go. Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib. This is not solving problems. This is doing tech for the sake of doing tech. Wasting everyone's time. Remember that code is not the deliverable.

pstuart 2mo ago
I'm confused by what language regression you are referring to. > Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib Why? If it works now it works. Refactoring tools exist, and LLMs make this trivial. You just seem to hate the language and everything about it, and that's your right but I think your arguments are specious and ignore that most language that go mainstream evolve and that comes with tradeoffs (python2 -> python3, rust in general, etc). And as far as deliverables go, the code is absolutely foundational to that and Go was made to be maintainable by codemonkeys such as myself. Anyway, the language and the changes noted in the OP apparently aren't for you and that's ok -- there's plenty of languages out there for everyone's taste.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
jppittma 2mo ago
Claude will migrate your whole repo in an hour.
- kokada 2mo ago
  I assume they will eventually add those to `go fix` too, so you don't even need Claude for the most basic refactors (the more complex ones, sure).
  - pstuart 2mo ago
    Likely but it may be asking too much to condense copypasta into generics -- but the tooling does improve on each release.
wbl 2mo ago
Nothing was broken in the change: there is no need to migrate.

pjmlp 2mo ago

You mean how Ada, Delphi, D, OCaml compile?

pstuart 2mo ago
And your point is? They didn't know how to do it "correctly" -- it took outside help from Philip Wadler (who helped with Generics in Java) to make it work acceptably. Of course the core team were a big bunch of dumb old stupidheads and they made a dumb language for dumb people, so you win, you're smarter than them.
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  Fast compilers with generics wasn't rocket science. Of course the language is for dumb people, Rob Pike even said it officially, poor souls that apparently cannot master better tools, even though they are able to work around Google's stupid hiring practices.
  - pstuart 2mo ago
    It would be a mistake to confuse simple for dumb. His comment about making it easy for junior engineers was about pragmatic software engineering and being able to deliver product at scale. There's plenty of far more advanced programming languages, e.g., Lisp, OCaml, Haskell, and even C++ as far as power of the language. But only one of those has gone mainstream and it was the C++ compilation time that inspired Go and Rust was also trying to be a better way to code within that paradigm. It's a matter of taste, and while hating being forced to use a language you don't like to use is one thing, hating the language itself is silly -- it's like hating roses because you like orchids. And if you think the original Go team was composed of dumb people you are also mistaken. They built a language they wanted to use, which I'd posit is a signal of "worthiness". Many people (including myself) enjoy using the language and it's created a lot of value in the software ecosystem.

9rx 2mo ago

> You take it as a conspiracy against developers when it's really a small team trying to find their way the best they can. Especially within a company more powerful than the individuals. The project was done, at least feature-wise, but then Google set it free to become a community-driven project, which opened the freedom to do new things again: https://go.dev/blog/go2-here-we-come https://go.dev/blog/go2-here-we-come