Why Generics?

I've started a number of large, highly deployed Go projects: Terraform, Vault, Packer, Consul, Nomad, and numerous libraries and other things. I started a company that employs hundreds of full time Go developers. Go has been one of our primary languages since Go 1.0 (and I used it prior to that).

Let me start by saying that there are _definitely_ cases where generics are the right answer. Usually when I talk about generics people tend to assume I disagree with the whole concept of generics but I certainly do not. Generics are useful and solve real problems.

Adding this paragraph after I already wrote the rest: this whole comment ended up sounding super negative. I'm voicing concerns! But, I think that the design proposal is exciting and I am interested to see where it goes. There are definitely places generics would be helpful to us, so please don't take my negativity too strongly.

## Technical Impact

Having written these numerous large, complex systems, I believe there are less than 10 instances where generics would've been super helpful. There are hundreds of more times where it would've been kind of nice but probably didn't justify the complexity of implementation or understanding.

This latter part is what worries me. I've worked in environments that use a language with generics as a primary language. It's very easy to have an N=2 or N=3 case and jump to generics as the right way to abstract that duplication. In reality, the right answer here is probably to just copy and paste the code because the knowledge complexity of using generics (for both producer and consumer) doesn't justify it, in my opinion.

As a technical leader, I'm not sure how to wrestle with this. Its easy today because generics just don't exist so you have to find a way around it. But for a 150+-sized org of Go developers, how do we have guidelines around when to use generics? I don't know yet. I guess that bleeds into human impact so...

## Human Impact!

Something that is AMAZING about Go today is that you can hire a junior developer with no experience with Go nor any job history, have them read a few resources (Tour of Go, Go Spec, Effective Go), and have them committing meaningful changes to a Go project within a week.

I don't say this as a hypothetical, this has happened numerous times in practice at our company. We don't force or push any new hires to do this, but Go is so approachable that it just happens.

I love it! It's so cool to see the satisfaction of a new engineer making a change so quickly. I've been told its been really helpful for self-confidence and feeling like a valuable member of a team quickly.

The Go contract design document is about 1/3rd the word count of the entire Go language spec. It isn't a simple document to understand. I had to re-read a few sections to understand what was going on, and I've used languages with generics in a job-setting and have also been a "professional" Go dev for 9 years.

So what worries me about this is technical merits aside, what impact does this have on learning the language and making an impact on existing codebases quickly?

I really like what Ian said about attempting to put the burden of complexity on the _author_ using generics, and not the _consumer_ calling that function. I think that's an important design goal. I'm interested to see how that works out but I'm a bit pessimistic about it.

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I have other viewpoints on generics but those are the two primary ones that stand out to me when I think about this proposal going forward.

Which shows the absurdity of the situation. The fact that it has generics demonstrates that generics are a useful and important feature. And yet they think their provided generics cover every possible use-case of generics that you will reasonably need in to use in Go.