On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 7:59 AM Space A. <reexist...@gmail.com> wrote: > > You are a smart guy, one of the smartest I have ever talked to. But it looks > like you somehow missed a very obvious thing. The people you mentioned (and > most of the so-called Go team) AFAIK are Google employees. They work for a > company and they are paid for the work they do. If, as you say, they spend so > much time, literally years, keep replying "if we find an approach that gives > value blablabla", how do you imagine anyone responsible for the process at > the end say smth like: "Alright guys, after spending so many man-years we > have few solutions, but we finally realized that we were moving in wrong > direction, so now we gonna be dropping everything for the sake of better > future of Go". Like c'mon? Read what's written, not just words and > punctuation, it was a one way ticket (and managers knew it), if you start > this process, start spending money and reporting man hours, you know that it > will land somewhere.
I understand that argument, but I don't believe that it accurately describes the development of the language. The clearest way to see that is by looking at counter-examples. There have been several efforts to change the Go language in the past that have, to date, failed to occur, despite people "spending money and reporting man hours." For example, the multiple proposals that flowed out of https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draft-error-handling-overview.md. None of them have been adopted. The people who work on Go, including the managers, are aware of the risks of "we've started this project so we must complete it." Language development doesn't work that way. It's OK to realize that some ideas just can't be made to work. This is helped by the fact that most language changes don't require much work to start out. For many years I was the only person working on generics in Go, and I certainly wasn't doing it full time. Then for several years it was Robert Griesemer and I, again not full time. Today there are several people working on generics in Go, but that is only because we got it to the point of a proposal that could be accepted. > And I repeat, there wasn't a (public) question or discussion or anything > regarding should we drop this topic entirely. There have been many public discussions on this mailing list as to whether generics should be dropped entirely. Ian -- 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. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAOyqgcU_pYU%2BVHkhQDeQ8gTy6CXfB76g1OZdarCJ4YqY6VbGPg%40mail.gmail.com.
