This is probably just age. I had two CS professors, one in the late 90s and the other around 2004, draw a similar distinction.
"Parametric polymorphism" was the "whole" feature, while "generics" meant specifically generic containers, usually wholly agnostic about their type parameters, like std::map or std::list. Since the rise of Java Generics (which are really somewhere in between, more than containers but less than full parametric polymorphism) I don't hear this distinction anymore.
Re:Rob Pike interview
by AnimalMuppet on Thursday April 30, 2020 @04:27PM
(#23035690)
You know, Pike was at Bell Labs for a few decades when it was the premiere computer science research place on the planet. It's possible that he has a more technical definition of generics in mind here. (Or he could be being evasive. What's quite unlikely is that he doesn't know the real definition of generics.)
Re:Rob Pike interview
by steveklabnik on Thursday April 30, 2020 @02:47PM
(#23034561)
(Also, once Rust gets specialization, our generics will no longer be parametric.)
What exactly is misleading about generics?
The psychology of thought leaders is fascinating. The term generics is colloquially understood to mean parametric polymorphism and here's Pike redefining the term to draw some distinction that doesn't really exist just to remain self-consistent.
Come to think of it, this is a really common pattern. If you've made remarks that you must now backtrack then refine terms until your old writing doesn't seem to contradict your current stance because you can just say people were using the terms wrong and you were right.
Some results for searching "generics": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-g..., https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/generics.html, https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/LanguageGuide/Generics.htm..., https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/generics.html. If you search for "Wadler generics" then a book about generics in Java is the first result: https://www.amazon.com/Java-Generics-Collections-Development....