For sure — a lot of language features need to be generic. But most people aren’t coding language features, and giving them the ability to do so can lead to, well, CodeFactoryFactoryMakerGenericMethodHelpersFactory, rather than good, clear, usable code.
There is no language feature for a tree map. Many problems require a tree map. Either inclusion of generics was a good thing, or it is worth sacrificing static typing or requiring codegen for these use cases. Repeat for numerous collections and APIs.
Disallowing someone from using easy statically typed tree maps is not accomplishing any of the simplicity virtues people trumpet Go for having. While the much-warned-of castles of inappropriately applied generics have yet to be found in any codebase I've worked with in any language, including Rust.
This is a pretty arbitrary benchmark. I would guess, again, that 95% of programmers have never and will never need to create a tree map. Repeat for numerous collections and APIs that are totally irrelevant to most programmers' actual experience of programming.
Go is optimized for use, not computer science edge cases. And as a result it is widely used, and some of the most complicated and widely-used open-source projects out there are built in it, even before it had generics. For example, Kubernetes.
This is because of Go's simplicity, not in spite of it.
You may not have ever encountered a use case for a tree map, but there is quite a wide gray area between 'computer science edge cases' and cookie-cutter CRUD apps. For example, deterministic map ordering, or sets for map keys, or fast map equality.
Funny that you mention Kubernetes. This is the tree map implementation Kubernetes depends on https://github.com/google/btree
It's not about creating a tree map, it's just about using one. Maybe even one provided by a library, doesn't matter. I'm sure that 95% of the developers will need a tree map at least once in their career.
I've been using Golang professionally for about a decade. In that time the only place I've ever needed to use a tree map was an interview that specifically called for it.
Whose usage are you trying to optimize the language for? Golang is not a good academic language. But it is extremely good for actually solving problems with code.
I've spent a lot of time writing library-level C++, a reasonable amount of time writing application-level C++, and a reasonable amount of time writing both library and application-level golang.
> But most people aren’t coding language features
It's definitely a tough lever, but supporting generics for the people who are means that the people who aren't can write cleaner code. I think go got it right, eventually.
You are writing a Turing complete language. If someone wants to be stupid architecture astronauts, you can’t help them, beside better filtering people who work on your project.
