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Generics enabled by default in Go tip

go-review.googlesource.com

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Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#81

Post by silisili »

lokedhs wrote: post #73
silisili wrote: post #9

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.

Back when generics were introduced to Java I felt the same thing. I had been doing Java for years at that time. I had also been working for Sun, so of course I was exposed to it. I was very negative towards generics and had similar arguments as you. It didn't take long before I changed my mind. I'd never want to write Java without generics again. I'm not saying you're going to have the same experience, but I would su…

Thanks for your experience, really. Here's hoping.

Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#82

Post by jolux »

silisili wrote: post #67
bogota wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If i wanted or needed generics i would use another language. I have been able to write great code without them for 5 years now though. But now i get to defend my codebases from the unneeded introduction of them from largely developers who think they are too smart.

Same here. But I think it's more laziness than 'too smart.' I like to liken it to house construction. Imagine if a number of people demanded that natural gas and water be combined. Why do I have to make two separate pipes? They even look the same!

There are just things you can’t do without having generics in your language. User-defined collections, for one. Statically typed higher order functions, for another. To paraphrase (I believe) Bob Harper, you either have a statically typed language with generics, or you have a dynamically typed language. That’s the result of not having generics. Code that needs them becomes more dangerous and error-prone.

Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#83

Post by tptacek »

reissbaker wrote: post #52
tptacek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While it's true that some find it liberating, a large number don't — personally, I've written a fair amount of production Go code and found it unnecessarily verbose and repetitive in ways that generics would've helped. I imagine some of this is based on problem domain; if you're writing a web application for example, maybe you don't really need generics much. After all, how often do you need a function that logs in a…

Sure, that's true, and it's fine. There are people who find s-expressions both liberating and clarifying, and others who get lost in a sea of parentheses. And there are problems that are especially amenable to s-expressions, or generics, or fine-grained control of memory allocation, or interwoven code and markup, object hierarchies, and those problems sort of "ask" for particular languages. But for the most part, this stuff is subjective.

Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#84

Post by infogulch »

nynx wrote: post #10
peter_l_downs wrote: post #4

Super excited for this. If you haven't checked out the latest proposal, here's an example of what Option/Result box types might look like (obviously not ready for release, just an experiment): https://go2goplay.golang.org/p/krvTH1_7lwX

Result isn’t an enumeration of sorts?

No, Go doesn't have discriminated/tagged unions or valued-enumerations or whatever you want to call them, but generics let you hack them in without much trouble. Personally I'd take ADTs over generics any day, but it's not a dichotomy maybe we'll still get them some day.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19412

Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#85

Post by jshen »

leshow wrote: post #76
jshen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem more complex compared to a type parameter when you are only thinking about this narrow situation. However, generics are not limited to this narrow situation and will cause complexity far beyond what you are imagining. Having said that, I honestly don’t know if generics are a net positive or not. What I can say is that go is one of the few languages where I can jump into an arbitrary go code base and make se…

I'm well aware when they are useful, I've been using them in languages for the past 10 years. By the same token though, leaving type parameters out of the language has had far reaching implications outside of this "narrow" situation (I'll put forth that implementing a data structure isn't a narrow situation). Error handling and the lack of sum types also seem particularly egregious and are heavily influenced by the l…

I’ve been using them for the past 30 years and have come to a different conclusion. You have plenty of languages that do what you want. I hope go doesn’t lose what made it different

Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#86

Post by rustc »

jshen wrote: post #51
tengbretson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning something is also an option.

Learning things outside of complex computer science topics often adds more value to the world. The ability to write useful programs without dedicating ones life to esoteric comp sci topics is a net positive for the world.

Are generics really considered as "esoteric comp sci topics"?

Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#87

Post by takeda »

bogota wrote: post #53
silisili wrote: post #9

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.

If i wanted or needed generics i would use another language. I have been able to write great code without them for 5 years now though. But now i get to defend my codebases from the unneeded introduction of them from largely developers who think they are too smart.

You can totally do fine without generics depending what you do. It mostly affects code that supposed to be reusable, especially libraries.

Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#88

Post by tptacek »

coryrc wrote: post #78
theshrike79 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "verbose and repetitive", I say "easy to read without any surprises". The verbose patterns (if err!= nil for example) make the code predictable to read, you notice the code smell of missing error handling really fast.

Or use Option or Result, so your error handling is small and forcibly correct.

Error handling in Rust isn't always small or straightforward. I miss both options and match expressions when I switch back to Go from Rust, but there's also tangles of or_else's and maps and the fact that everyone uses third-party libraries to work out the types for errors. There's tradeoffs everywhere you look.

Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#89

Post by Cloudef »

ramchip wrote: post #15
peter_l_downs wrote: post #4

Super excited for this. If you haven't checked out the latest proposal, here's an example of what Option/Result box types might look like (obviously not ready for release, just an experiment): https://go2goplay.golang.org/p/krvTH1_7lwX

> Viewing and/or sharing code snippets is not available in your country for legal reasons. This message might also appear if your country is misdetected. If you believe this is an error, please file an issue. Wow, interesting. I'm in Japan.

Works for me (also japan)

Re: Generics enabled by default in Go tip

#90

Post by pm90 »

buu700 wrote: post #18
silisili wrote: post #9

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.

I personally think this will be a great thing for the quality of the language (no typed higher-order functions is a massive pain point as-is), but at the same time one could argue that this is an equally massive bait-and-switch for all the developers who prefer Go's original take on "simplicity".

Go is still pretty “simple”. They didn’t introduce a while loop. Adding generics would arguably “simplify” the language even further since you would presumably throw away a lot of duplicated code.
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