Channels Are Not Enough

My experience interacting with the Go community on golang-nuts was generally pleasant and productive. I haven't experienced or witnessed any hostility, except maybe some hotted debates, but they happen on all programming languages mailing lists. What makes you think the Go community can be hostile?

I think that experienced Go programmers simply write the code using the types they need.

I think the essay is entirely correct: there are certain patterns that are difficult to write in Go. It's hard to write generic code that merges two channels into one. It's hard to write generic code that acts as a future.

But it's easy to write type-specific code to perform those operations. Most Go programs do not need to merge channels of many different types. So people simply write the code they need when they need it.

This is not to say that there is no use for generics. There is clearly a use for generics, and examples using channels are among the strongest use cases. I'm just trying to answer your question about what Go developers actually do.

> ...but consider that if you see lots of people complaining about something, its possibly not because they're all idiots, or pretentious self important HN posers (who certainly do exist).

My only point was that just because you like languages like Haskell, that doesn't mean you can't have a fun time with Go. The reason why I said it was to push back against this notion that generics are clearly necessary in all modern languages. We should embrace alternative designs and consider them for the trade offs they make, not denigrate them as objectively incorrect.

If I had it my way, a good discussion of language design withholds judgment and outlines the trade offs. Once the trade offs are made clear, we can start to express opinions (or needs or judgments) based on which ones we want to make. This avoids the popular notion that there is some sort of minimal feature set that makes a language minimally viable.

FYI, these are not well formed thoughts. You could probably poke holes in them, but at the end of day: we should endeavor to balance trade offs in lieu of speaking from authority. (I'm not saying you are doing that, but certainly, others in this thread are.)

> The key issue being raised in this thread is that the golang community is dismissive of complaints, even when there are lots of them. and there are, quantitatively, lots of complaints.

What do you mean by "dismissive"? Most of the popular criticisms have been hashed out repeatedly on golang-nuts. Usually it comes down to the fact that a particular feature doesn't have a known implementation that fits into the design goals of the project.

The design goals are important because they say up front, "Here are the things we think are important and our project will be based on those things. If you think there are other things that are more important, then this project may not be for you."

That isn't dismissive IMO. It is an explicit statement of project scope.

> rather than themselves becoming a pretentious 'there no problem here' self agreeing community.

The problem is that they acknowledge the value of generics but don't know how to incorporate it without sacrificing other goals that are paramount to the project.

Just as you think Gophers blissfully cover the ears in wild ignorance, so to do they think that plenty of others aren't acknowledging trade offs. There is truth on both sides here. It is quite agreeable to say, "I have a really hard time programming without generics, so Go just isn't for me." It is quite another to say, "Go doesn't even have generics? Wow, they just ignored 3 decades worth of PL research."

> (and to be clear; I like go, but I dont visit golang-nuts anymore, because of the community there)

Yes, the community can be very thorny. But I can't blame them. They've been ruthlessly attacked since the start (generics, nulls, exceptions) for preferring a Worse Is Better approach to solving problems.

> Performance: if you replace all generics with interface{}, you get performance that is at better or equal to current Go code.

That is incorrect. Using `interface{}` incurs a significant performance penalty at runtime because you end up boxing everything. For example, you cannot cast a `[]interface{}` to an arbitrary `[]A`.

In other words, no, `interface{}` is not `void*`, sorry. If it was, Go would not be memory safe. (See golang.org for their definition of memory safety. It is strictly superior to a language like C, but e.g., less than a language like Rust.)

Seriously?

"...we understand some programmers do... ...we continue to think about it... ...This remains an open issue."