4 ms·

This happens because almost every time there's someone who more or less asks what in the world generics are for since they can do everything they want to with G

• mitchty 12y ago
  I always saw it as the classical: why do you want a screwdriver to put the screw in place? The hammer should be good enough! Well, sure, I guess you can pound a screw into things with a hammer but you're missing the point.
  • pekk 12y ago
    Or just build your furniture without using screws, like in Japanese carpentry. When people are already having a decent time building things using the tool, it looks pretty stupid to tell them they've done it all wrong for years in all the decent products they made.
    • ufo 12y ago
      Parametric polymorphism gives safety guarantees that you can't easily obtain without language support. For example if you have a function typed "forall a . a -> a" you know it has to be the identity function (or something that bypasses the typesystem, like infinite loops or a runtime exception).
      • 4ydx 12y ago
        And in Go since there is no parametric polymorphism you would end up writing either: 1) Methods with names that indicate the parameter types. 2) Method calls on objects to convert some internal struct data from one type to another. 3) Something I haven't thought of that doesn't involve losing a handle on your type. So there is certainly a loss in convenience, but if you use the type system it can be just as safe as a functional language as far as I can tell. So, yeah, it isn't as intellectually elegant, but it also isn't really that hard to deal with.
        • ufo 12y ago
          No you can't. The point of generics is that you don't need to specify the parameter types - the parameter type is also a parameter. This means that you can write type safe container operations like "map" and "filter". The only way to write this kind of generic code in Go is to cast everything to `interface{}`, which can't be checked statically. If you are still not convinced, one of the things you can do with generics is say "these two parameters have the same type". In Go the best you can do is say "these two parameters are subclasses of something", which is less precise.
          • 4ydx 12y ago
            Yeah I follow you. I am providing ways of trying to work around the lack of a higher level type class system. As a baseline, I would recommend not jumping outside golang's given type system just because it feels inconvenient for the programmer. That means you don't get to write a generic method for, for instance, all integers. Too bad :P This means the programmer does have to do more work, but the type system is always strictly enforced. That is better in my opinion.
  • aangjie 12y ago
    Technically a coin should be enough to put a screw in place. winks depending on the size of the screw of course. :-)
    • Gurkenmaster 12y ago
      Don't worry! All the screws have the same size and your coin is compatible. (Go's builtin data types which have generics) You want to use different screws? You're on your own.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]