The introduction of generics would not change your workflow though. You could still happily "not use it" and keep matters readable. Others who wanted it, would use it.
That ship already sailed with widespread misuse of interfaces. Consider:
package foo
type T interface { func Bar() }
func New() T {
return &someotherpackage.ImplPickedAtRuntime{...}
}
Now whenever you see:
x := foo.New()
x.Bar()
You have no idea where to read the code for Bar. For maximum fun, ImplPickedAtRuntime should then contain members that were allocated in the same way. What should be a simple M-. then eats up your entire afternoon.
If others people code uses it, then those other people deemed it useful.
So the argument for not having them now becames either:
(a) they rather not have it available, because you personally don't find it useful
(b) those using generic don't know what they're doing, and only people not using generic are smart, so it's better to not have them to prevent the clueless from being able to use them
Like I said, I use (and like) several languages that have Generics, and when I need to do something where it makes sense, I can reach for those. For me there was an advantage in having a language where it wasn't an option.
Your (b) scenario is quite a strawman. I have seen plenty of good code using Generics, but sure, there is subset of code written using Generics that is not good, and I think it becomes easier to obfuscate code and make it hard to read if you have Generics, that might just by my bias, and I think I'm tainted from C++ and hopefully it will never become as bad as what you can encounter there.
I'm not trying to make out that Generics have no place in Computer Science. I was trying to make the case for it being nice that there was a language that didn't have it, and was building on the grandparent saying that he didn't miss it that often, which mirrors my experience with Go.
This is a silly strawman. Developers often write hard to read code, and even if generics are useful to the writer, doesn't mean they are useful to the reader. Many developers do not consider the reader, or if they do, not very in-depth. You can also make the argument that generic code is uniformly harder to read than specific code.
