Item — HN Reader

What about all those people who came to Go from Python, JavaScript, Ruby and whatnot? They are mostly content with the current status quo, generics would just make the learning cliff steeper for them. And according to the Go devs, more people come to Go from Python than from, say, C++. So perhaps it makes sense to stay at that level, at least for now?

All I'm saying is this doesn't seems like a simple equation to me. There are many possible solutions to the problem of building large, correct, maintainable, performant programs - and neither of the existing ones looks like a surefire winner given all the limitations.

3 comments

People who came to Go from Python, JavaScript, and Ruby will likely have had a steepish learning curve getting used to pointers in Go. I hadn't used pointers since programming in C++ in 1995 when I switched to Go, and it took a bit of time to get used to remembering that extra detail.

In fact, because I used Clojure just before switching to Go, I found not having immutable variables harder to get into the habit of more than anything else. I actually first used Go because I needed to write something that manipulated bits in memory reliably, and couldn't be bothered going back to Java.

Indeed, not many developers have moved from C++ to Go, though there are a few from Java who might miss generics. Here is some recent data on this:

https://golangnews.com/stories/1490-results-of-the-gopher-la...

This is probably a self-fulfilling cycle to some extent... the people using go are by definition willing to tolerate the lack of generics, while those for whom it's a dealbreaker won't be represented. If go did introduce generics, it might start appealing to other types of developers.

Personally, I love most things about go, but its utter clumsiness at iteration and data transformation relegate it to a fairly limited number of use cases in my mind.

I agree containers are the one area this is a painful lack at present. Perhaps they'll look again at this in a Go 2 if they ever get round to that.

I do also really value the lack of change in the language though, it is important and rare that it is stable and not accreting features every year (compare with rust or c++).

> What about all those people who came to Go from Python, JavaScript, Ruby and whatnot? They are mostly content with the current status quo,

As a counter-example, I'm not sure this is true.