I program since the mid-80's, many of the features in modern languages weren't always available outside research institute walls, and yet we managed to deliver any sort of software with the tools we had at our disposal.

However, now that those features are part of the majority of mainstream languages, I surely don't want to go back to how I used to write software in the first two decades of my career.

Developers have been using C and a bunch of other imperative languages for years. They obviously, created software two order magnitudes more complex than CockroachDB (or Docker, or Kubernetes, or etcd). We used to write entire operating systems in assembly, heavens forbid. Just look at the PostgreSQL codebase (all C) and compare that to cockroach DB.

Being "a better C" was the original battle cry of Go. It's definitely better than C (well, at least for some thing), but it doesn't mean all of these complex C software people used to write are toys.

Go is obviously not a useless toy language either. But that doesn't mean you won't miss features from more expressive languages. The amount of calls for generics from Go users tell a different story.

> The amount of calls for generics from Go users tell a different story

I think it is from Non-Go users who would use Go if only it had generics.

Some of it, probably. But some are probably using Go out of necessity (your company enforces Go), or because they still think Go is their best pragmatic option, lack of generics notwithstanding.

I do competitive programming using Go and sorely miss "generics" so I'm pretty sure that your thought is not entirely correct.

Software can be complex without having very complex types

The guys who wrote CockroachDB never, afaik, tried to write it in Scala, and never told us whether they miss flatMap, generics, or something like that.

They guys from Movio did; their problem domain is likely different.