> I wonder what would happen with Go if they never changed their mind and kept it without generics?
Change their mind? What do you mean? Go always maintained it would get them, once the right design was found – which was echoed by Ian Lance Taylor actually working on them even before the first public release. He alone has, what, 8 different failed proposals?
The problem was always, quite explicitly, that nobody within the Go team had the full expertise necessary to create something that wasn't going to be a nightmare later. As you may recall, once they finally got budget approval to hire an outside domain expert, the necessary progress was finally made.
Being an open source project, you'd think the armchair experts on HN would have stepped in and filled in that gap, but I suppose it is always easier to talk big than to act.
> The problem was always, quite explicitly, that nobody within the Go team had the full expertise necessary to create something that wasn't going to be a nightmare later. As you may recall, once they finally got budget approval to hire an outside domain expert, the necessary progress was finally made.
This is a very interesting part and looks like you know about what happened. I wonder how come Go team had many super talented experts (Pike and Thompson for example) with a "power" of Google behind them and generics were an issue at all, while for example Crystal being a very similar language with native code generation, similar concurrency model and no big tech behind it managed to pull it off?
I've read some comments of devs who used both and they say Crystal is just plainly better.
This just doesn't make sense to me, the biggest tech company on the planet should create a language that is head above everything else, but ended up being just good.
Change their mind? What do you mean? Go always maintained it would get them, once the right design was found – which was echoed by Ian Lance Taylor actually working on them even before the first public release. He alone has, what, 8 different failed proposals?
The problem was always, quite explicitly, that nobody within the Go team had the full expertise necessary to create something that wasn't going to be a nightmare later. As you may recall, once they finally got budget approval to hire an outside domain expert, the necessary progress was finally made.
Being an open source project, you'd think the armchair experts on HN would have stepped in and filled in that gap, but I suppose it is always easier to talk big than to act.