(I was on the Go team for ages)

Seriously, that's all it was. Just Ian alone proposed and rejected a half dozen of his own different approaches to generics. Finally a language + implementation plan came together that people all liked.

Nobody was ever opposed to generics that I saw.

If bug free binary search implementation can take 16 years, I am ready to buy generics implementation could take 20 years.

> In his landmark book The Art of Computer Programming, legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth noted that although the first binary search algorithm was published by John Mauchly in 1946, the first bug-free version was not published until 1962—taking a staggering 16 years to get right.

> what changed in the perspectives of the language maintainers?

The original maintainers moved on to other projects and the new community maintainers came to a consensus through the proposal and governance process.

It’s also not true that because it wasn’t part of the initial design that it was harder to retrofit. I just don’t understand all this go bashing that happens on this site especially when so much is badly informed speculation. I guess it’s easier to tear something down.

No.

I kind of want to leave it there. But that will probably be looked on disfavorably.

I've seen at least a dozen attempts. It's not like it's hard to write it out. There's maybe a couple of variants but they're all just a handful of lines. The problem is, once you have an Option in hand, you end up trading:

    val, err := whatever(...)
    if err != nil {
        // handle error
    }
    // use val

    val := whatever(...)
    if err, isErr := val.Error(); isErr {
        // handle error
    }
    realVal := val.Value()
    // use realVal

There's also no win in trying to offer a monadic interface like

    finalVal := whatever(...).OnVal(func (val Value) opt.Option[Result] {
        // use val
    })

Really the solution is, install golangci-lint, turn on errcheck [1], use a pre-commit hook to make it a commit failure if golangci-lint fires, and that pretty much covers the problem in practice.

[1]: https://golangci-lint.run/docs/linters/configuration/#errche...