Nothing complex about generics that the average modern day programmer can't grasp. We're not talking about some '00s enterprise drones that were never exposed to those concepts.
People used to talk like this about closures in Java too -- "too complex, who needs them", etc. Didn't turn out very well for the language's mindshare about the new generation of programmers...
Actually C# already had generics even before the 1.0 .NET release, but they weren't considered stable enough for a 1.0 release and priority was given to other parts of the .NET.
What's the casual definition of complexity? Stuff in here I don't like?
Honestly, in the medal positions for sloppily expressed programming sentiments, complex/simple occupy the bronze/silver positions just behind the ultimate... "elegant".
The complexity was not the issue, CLU, Ada, Eiffel, Sather, Modula-3, ML, and many others lacked the publicity stunt of having a godfather like Google.
In reality of people just don't know how to program without generics. Go provides interfaces which can be used to write generic code. Think of everything that has been written in C without generics or Java pre 1.4.
I'm all of the day generics is finely added (and yes I missed it a lot when I was new to Go a couple years ago), but it is much less of a issue then some people make it out to be.
I don't doubt that generics are very useful, but its a problem when every thread that mentions Go gets polluted by bitching from people who can't code without them.
I work with SQL mostly, and in find common table expressions very useful to simplify and (in some cases) enhance performance. When faced with a choice between MySQL and PostgreSQL, I could either 1) choose to gripe about the lack of CTEs in MySQL, or 2) use PostgreSQL.
Something about generics make so many people on HN choose the equivalent of (1).
