51–60 of 378 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might me, in time. As mentioned, my main interest in Go is in how easily I can read others code. This kinda ruins that, even if I never use it.
Learning something is also an option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you write a singly linked list who’s contents are arbitrary? What if you were to map a function over it? Say you want to use this data structure with third-party objects? How do you do that right now?
You wouldn't. Everybody goes into Go thinking that's absurdly confining. Some significant subset of Go programmers learn that they instead find it liberating. Programming is programming; you have an overwhelming number of degrees of freedom no matter what language you work in. It sometimes turns out that taking some of those degrees out of the language makes it easier to focus them on your problem domain.
That being said for a lot of other uses, you really do want high quality data structures beyond "array" and "dictionary."
Not to be contrary for its sake, but I'll say this is one change I'm really not happy about. I feel like it's a change to placate many, while driving a lesser amount away. Which is fine, but still feels like the end of something, as I am one of the aforementioned 'lesser.' As for why...I love above most the simplicity and readability of Go. Any change which encroaches that, which this does, is a net negative to me.
Every HN thread about go: go is useless because it lacks generics. Go adds generics. HN thread: I don't want this. Good case study about the people drawn to comment on a topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or good case study of squeaky wheels. I never wanted generics. I never thought to spam the development lists about how much I liked how things were going.
a couple high profile projects (k8s) needed generics, there are limited use cases outlined in the planning docs that detail the holes in the language they're filling, it wasn't just squeaky wheels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you could have gotten that work done with fewer than 500,000 loc if you used a language with a better feature set.
And it would have been far harder to read for those new to the generic code base. Complex abstractions make people feel smart, they rarely make code easier to understand or maintain.
Not to be contrary for its sake, but I'll say this is one change I'm really not happy about. I feel like it's a change to placate many, while driving a lesser amount away. Which is fine, but still feels like the end of something, as I am one of the aforementioned 'lesser.' As for why...I love above most the simplicity and readability of Go. Any change which encroaches that, which this does, is a net negative to me.
Yes there will be some pockets of libraries where authors take generics to an extreme. Besides being a bit of fun, it's good to explore the edges of what you can do with the language, so this exercise will be valuable even if you don't use them regularly in your projects.
But I don't really see pervasive gratuitous use of generics becoming a big problem for the average lib, Go devs tend to lean practical on potentially abused features like this, and there will be many users like yourself that will still prefer simpler interfaces. I guess we'll see over time.
Really, Go's lack of generics for so long wasn't an ethos (despite many taking it that way) but more that the right implementation just hadn't revealed itself yet. I think the one they chose is a pretty good match for Go, and I hope that it makes Go more complete.
I've never used Go, and from the outside I take a lot of issues with its design choices. But even without having used it I always thought the lack of generics was very interesting and I could see how it was desirable. It's fascinating to me that Go has gotten as far as it has without them (proving that it's possible to), and the mindset shift people describe having around them seems like a really important thing to p…
They are defined in the builtin pseudo-package: https://pkg.go.dev/builtin
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you write a singly linked list who’s contents are arbitrary? What if you were to map a function over it? Say you want to use this data structure with third-party objects? How do you do that right now?
Singly linked lists are something from CS1 where you learn about data structures. You rarely use them in practice. In most cases slices and maps do the job fine.