Generics being omitted wasn't pitched as a feature that I ever saw. The discussion was mostly around "hic sunt dracones" with generics. The Go authors were very aware from the get-go that generics are an incredibly difficult thing to implement well, and the commitment was always to not do it until they were really ready to tackle it. The bizarre thing to me is that when they did tackle it, they left this massive implementation gap, and then what little they did implement didn't seem useful enough that anything meaningful was added to the standard library. So all this talk about generics for years was a big nothing-burger. That is, I hope, until 1.27 when this gets released. Flags is one in particular I think is in desperate need of proper generic methods.