I feel like Go was built with primary design considerations that are often not considered publicly and often at odds with what programmers want out of a language. I saw one of the first public talks from the creators at Google I/O and they stressed two things: compilation speed and new developers coming up to speed quickly. From what they said, Google had a few C++ projects with multi-hour compilation times that, when profiled, showed about 90% of the time was spent reading header files. So a core Go philosophy was single-pass compilation to cut down compile times as much as possible. Similarly they stressed that the focus on simplicity meant there wasn’t as much variation in style of Go code and new programmers—even those unfamiliar with Go—could quickly come up to speed and contribute to a project.

Viewed through this lens, the resistance on the part of the creators to changes that compromise these values even a little bit makes sense. Generics take time to get used to and any code base that makes extensive use of them will take longer to get up to speed in, even if it enables you to move faster later on.

That talk has really shaped how I look at Go. I think it solves problems that Google has (really large projects built by teams that have a ton of turnover) really well. But as with a lot of things that emerge from Google, it’s a solution to a problem that not too many other companies face. The ones that do will get an awesome tool that’s proven to work. But the ones for whom it’s 90% of what they need are going to get a lot of pushback getting that last 10% accepted because it already does almost exactly what Google needs it to do and any departure from that will be, in their minds, counterproductive.