I think "need" is indeed one of those special words that means different things for different people. Go doesn't "need" generics and you technically don't "need" anything except air, water, food, a sharp spear, and shelter, to survive.
I recently started toying with writing quick-n-dirty programs for the original NES and it's amazing to see what people were able to accomplish with 2KB RAM, *one* general-purpose register, no hardware multiply/divide, etc Heck, it's even *fun* to do some of those things using 6502 assembly from scratch! Doesn't mean I sometimes don't wish for certain quality-of-life improvements with that experience, even though I can definitely do it all from scratch, given infinite free time. Does Go "need" (in the hunter-gatherer sense) generics? Absolutely not! Go to me is an awesome little house on a beach. I love going to it in the summer. Everything is great about it. Almost. It just doesn't have hot water. I have to heat water myself and carry it for a 1/4 mile every time I want to shower. It's kind of annoying, but not a big deal in itself to make me stop going to the awesome super fun summer house. I really like functional programming paradigms for data transformation tasks. I like chaining map(...).reduce(....).filter(.....).skip(.....).drop(....).select(....) etc. and building a nice pipeline through which my data can flow. I *can* do it all with loops, of course. Just like I can carry hot water for a 1/4 mile every day. I'd love to be able to write generic compile-time type-safe functions but I can live without them. On Saturday, July 29, 2017 at 4:59:55 PM UTC-6, Shawn Milochik wrote: > > As with every community, there's the silent majority and the vocal > minority. > > It's easy to be confused, and think that the lack generics is a major > issue in the Go community. It is *not*. > > The number 500,000 Go developers worldwide has been thrown around a lot > this month. (https://research.swtch.com/gophercount) > > Evidently most of them are using Go just fine -- as individuals, at > startups, and at huge companies. > > At every scale, Go's adoption is amazing and the the projects they're > building are changing the world: > > - You don't need generics to write Docker. > - You don't need generics to write Kubernetes. > - We could add so much more to this list, but you get my point. > > So, let's stop feeding the trolls. The far fewer than 1% of the people who > have not yet taken the time to appreciate Go for what it is, and therefore > find it lacking in comparison to something they have taken the time to > appreciate. I don't mean to belittle those people by calling them trolls, > but they are trolling. I'm sure most of them who give the language an > honest, unbiased try will come around. > > Imagine if Go programmers went to other language mailing lists and > complained about the lack of goroutines and channels, which clearly make > those other language "unfit for concurrent programming." That would be > equally unhelpful. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
