Seriously, that's all it was. Just Ian alone proposed and rejected a half dozen of his own different approaches to generics. Finally a language + implementation plan came together that people all liked.
Nobody was ever opposed to generics that I saw.
> In his landmark book The Art of Computer Programming, legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth noted that although the first binary search algorithm was published by John Mauchly in 1946, the first bug-free version was not published until 1962—taking a staggering 16 years to get right.
> Fast forward to 2006. I was shocked to learn that the binary search program that Bentley proved correct and subsequently tested in Chapter 5 of Programming Pearls contains a bug. ... Lest you think I'm picking on Bentley, let me tell you how I discovered the bug: The version of binary search that I wrote for the JDK contained the same bug. It was reported to Sun recently when it broke someone's program, after lying in wait for nine years or so.
https://research.google/blog/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-n...
Loads fine for me:
> The bug is in this line:
6: int mid =(low + high) / 2;
The right way is a + (b - a)/2.
am I tearing something down in my comment?
The details of Go generics, their advantages and disadvantages compared to other languages, etc., are absolutely interesting to discuss. But there is nothing hiding behind the “official” story.
The Go ecosystem was a delicate, special thing. It was a wholesale rejection of the malignant consultancy takeover of programming that had festered and spread for the previous 15 years. Introducing generics was a grievous error, and they just keep making it worse.
It used to be you could look at any Go code from any author and pretty much instantly understand it completely. That’s no longer the case.
It used to be you would work on a problem, just writing the code from top to bottom. No time wasted fiddling with abstractions you’ll never use. You’d grumble about it, but succumbing to the temptation was impossible. That’s no longer the case.
When I read these grumbling takes about how Go use to be so simple etc I imagine devs who would revel in all the features they were unable to implement because it would be too difficult in the language. Or devs who love typing and re-typing the same code over and over again, littering their code with switch cases and conditional logic while passing themselves on the back for avoiding “abstraction”.
Fine in principle, but AFAIK it never really caught on because the ergonomics suck. Interfaces/traits/type classes do seem to be a popular feature across languages, for what it's worth.
The original maintainers moved on to other projects and the new community maintainers came to a consensus through the proposal and governance process.