Re:Go: Support for Generic Methods
by galangalalgol on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @09:13AM
(#48293804)
Type hinting seems like the worst of both. You pay the cost on refactor to go change them all, where dynamic typing or static type inference avoid that. You also don't have any of the benefits of static or dynamic typing. My strong preference is static typing with good inference and an ide that shows the inferred types everywhere when asked. Dynamic typing can make some tasks dramatically easier, I'm just not capable of using them without making hideous mistakes.
Of course adding generics is not something that every language needs to do. Scripting languages like Ruby don't really need this style of generics. It doesn't fit the design of the language, and it's not even clear what that would look like in Ruby.
But static typing with generics does solve a recurring problem, and we've seen some real convergence towards type hints and type systems even in staunchly dynamic scripting languages. Modern Javascript is now mostly Typescript, and they've successfully retrofitted a very advanced type system in the last place I would have expected 20 years ago.