Am I the only one who’s absolutely shocked that Go finally is embracing generics?

Does anyone have a bit of an inside view into what changed in the perspectives of the language maintainers?

I’m not buying the “it took us 20 years to understand how to do it correctly” argument, as this is something you explicitly take into consideration when designing the language or not. And it was specifically not a part of language design, and is much harder to retrofit (backwards compatibility).

So what changed?

(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.

Unfortunately nothing changed. They wanted generics all along.

The Go ecosystem was a delicate, special thing. It was a wholesale rejection of the malignant consultancy takeover of programming that had festered and spread for the previous 15 years. Introducing generics was a grievous error, and they just keep making it worse.

It used to be you could look at any Go code from any author and pretty much instantly understand it completely. That’s no longer the case.

It used to be you would work on a problem, just writing the code from top to bottom. No time wasted fiddling with abstractions you’ll never use. You’d grumble about it, but succumbing to the temptation was impossible. That’s no longer the case.

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.

and they're still worse than the 1970s state of the art lol