>At the time of writing, there's 110 comments on this post and 50 are replies to prodigal_erik's comment on not having generics. HALF the comments on this whole thread are discussing something that's already been discussed for years with no end in sight.
Doesn't that point to an actual demand for the feature, and a constant pain point for the language? Why else would it come up in all discussions? It's not about all discussions about Go spin off to random topics / features talk -- it's usually Generics. Similarly, I've not seen people discuss anything else than common pain points (or perceived pain points) in a language. E.g. with Python it will be about the GIL or the 2 to 3 transition. With JS the "fatigue" and/or the crazy coercion rules. With C++ how complicated it is or the slow template system. And so on.
Your argument is about ease of use, but people rooting for Generics also argue that they make lots of programming cases easier. Are there many programmers in 2017 really wishing that e.g. C# or Java rather didn't have generics?
And what the original feature set as designed isn't very relevant, as languages can and do evolve. Similarly for the opinions of the main developers.
No! My argument is more meta; that this whole discussion is an unproductive waste of time and I can't tell anymore if people are just trolling or looking to start a flame war by bringing up generics in a Go thread. It's noise and it's making Hacker News a worse place.
Doesn't that point to an actual demand for the feature, and a constant pain point for the language? Why else would it come up in all discussions? It's not about all discussions about Go spin off to random topics / features talk -- it's usually Generics. Similarly, I've not seen people discuss anything else than common pain points (or perceived pain points) in a language. E.g. with Python it will be about the GIL or the 2 to 3 transition. With JS the "fatigue" and/or the crazy coercion rules. With C++ how complicated it is or the slow template system. And so on.
Your argument is about ease of use, but people rooting for Generics also argue that they make lots of programming cases easier. Are there many programmers in 2017 really wishing that e.g. C# or Java rather didn't have generics?
And what the original feature set as designed isn't very relevant, as languages can and do evolve. Similarly for the opinions of the main developers.