Golang generics proposal has been accepted

Edit: Even better, use gofmt to convert each ASCII symbol into several unique Unicode symbols depending on usage, to show the semantic meaning. So [] as array is represented differently from [] as the template operator.

Edit 2: I suspect this one decision will prevent some developers from investigating golang and thus affecting uptake - choice of syntax matters.

I think Go has succeeded, despite, not because of the language itself. One very big limitation being the lack of generics or any sort of ability to leverage higher-order types. Sometimes making a small modification to a large codebase can require a huge footprint of lines modified, just because so much code winds up duplicated in slightly different contexts.

That being said, I really hope that Go's core team understands the drivers of its popularity and doesn't compromise the operational side for the sake of language improvements. Although higher-typed languages have no trouble achieving good runtime performance, it seems like there's a fundamental tradeoff at compile time. Scala, Haskell, even Typescript have painful compile times. I don't know if there's any theoretical reason for it to hold, but more typing complexity inevitably leads to slow compile times.

And as for the topic of clear error messages, the higher-typed languages are all atrocious at this. Even templates in C++ are notorious for puking near impossible to decipher errors. This is something I'm sure can be fixed with enough engineering effort, but it would probably take a lot of effort to get there.

In general, I bitch about the Go language all the time. But I think we should recognize that the simplicity of the language gives us developers a lot of peripheral really nice usability benefits.

The fact is when you're working with any data coming from any other system, the data is or will become null, somehow, some way, and your program code which treats this as impossible is just literally wrong in a way that is complete jibberish. Additionally, programmers don't want to pass huge lists of parameters to every function, but instead bundle things into structs to be easily passed around, however this model makes it impossible to treat a value as Optional at an early part of the callstack and Non-optional later in the callstack after it's been checked and verified. So you either pass everything as a separate parameter, copy things into different structs all over the place, or just make the value Optional everywhere, deleting the usefulness of making Optionals.... Optional. Just let it be null everywhere, and if it's null somewhere it shouldn't be, the program throws an error--like it should, because there's an error.

Actually, javascript is the only language that has it right. Not only can anything be null, anything can be undefined, (which isn't even remotely similar and anyone who doesn't understand why doesn't belong in the conversation,) AND values you don't know about can exist.

Your definition of "implicit nullability" is suspect here.

Go doesn't even implicitly de-reference things, which is what I think you're intending to say that it does. (EDIT: field access does cause a dereference, as was pointed out in a response to this comment. I still think of this as an explicit action when you're specifically operating on a pointer variable, but I'll concede this point here.)

Your position on this is really confusing at the moment. Go handles nullability in an extremely different way from Java.

Edit for your edit:

> clarification, to me it does not show in the type signature that something may return a null

The best way to know something won't be null is to use value types where possible. Don't return nilable values unless you have a good reason. When you return nilable values, only return nil when the error value isn't nil. This is a common pattern in Go code. Why would you return nil if there wasn't an error? If there was an error, why would you care what else was returned, outside of some very exceptional circumstances?

> also I do not have to unpack a possible null value (like with Maybe or Option).

I write Rust and Go professionally... I'm familiar with the pros and cons here, and I wish that Go would adopt Sum Types, but this has nothing to do with "implicit nullability", and in practice... it's really not a big deal. I've written huge amounts of Go code, and I just don't remember encountering nil exceptions in production except once in a blue moon -- and it is similarly common in Rust to hit an "expect" or "unwrap" that you thought was statically impossible to reach. Go has good editors (like GoLand) and linters (like golangci-lint) that make it easy to avoid most of the practical pitfalls.