I'm not mad, I'm a proponent of stronger type systems. I'm just correcting the record about

> They didn't say they never wanted to do generics, but that they did want to take their time and do them right.

What’s the correction? The two claims are not in conflict. Saying “we don’t expect to ever add X” is not equivalent to “we never wanted to add X.” It simply means that they didn’t think it would happen, which can coexist with an underlying willingness to consider it if a suitable approach appeared.

You added the word "want", the OP said "need". "We don't ever expect to add X" implies "we don't think we need X."

Clearly we don’t need this feature. Just because the Go team decides to implement a feature doesn’t imply that they must think that the language needs the feature. You’re searching for contradictions where none exist.

Ah, then they’re implementing needless features! What’s worse! lol

Most programming language features are not strictly needed. They’re just quality of life improvements that are on balance a good addition to the language.

Sure, but if you take that view, everything above assembly is a QOL improvement and we really don't need anything. That definition is pretty useless though.

Hmm, I don't think so. Go needs a string type to be a usable high-level programming language, but it doesn't need, say, the 'any' alias for 'interface{}'. Some features are more central than others. Perhaps none are 100% essential or inessential, but some features are clearly closer to one end of the spectrum than the other.

We care that time and time again, when anyone ever brings up a criticism of the language, they’re told that everything is just fine and it’s not a problem and we just don’t get the Go Philosophy. There’s not a problem, stop trying to make Go like every other language, and changing things would make the language more complicated and worse.

Then when the language is inevitably changed for the better, resolving the complaint, suddenly it was always going to happen and it was just a matter of getting the details right.

Every other language community I can think of is more than willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of their language. “Yeah, this kind of sucks in principle but it’s not something that gets in the way in practice” is a fine perspective. So is “this was a tradeoff; we went in this direction and these are the resulting downsides”. But the golang community practically trips over themselves to constantly argue that obvious shortcomings in the language are actually a good thing and we just don’t get it.

Nobody is saying the language shouldn’t improve. We’ve all been begging the language to improve. But we’re also tired of the constant, obvious, and shameless gaslighting from the community whenever things do get better. You aren’t going to like the comparison, but it’s extremely Trumpian.

Yeah, I worked with a guy in the late 2010s - one of the most painful people I've ever worked with - who would tell anyone that would listen that Go (as it was in 2018) was the perfect programming language - it had all the features you'd ever need - no more, no less. It doesn't need generics, the package management story is fine etc. Thankfully he's been out of my life for a long time now but I believe he's still writing Go, and I bet that he's telling anyone that will listen that Go (as it is in 2026) is the perfect programming language and that its implementation of generics was necessary and perfect etc.

He wasn't the only one but he certainly took it to the extreme.

This is an outlier. The Go team and community never endorsed that. In fact, their position has always been the opposite. To give just one example, see [1].

[1]: https://research.swtch.com/dogma

I think it’s pretty clear this post was a response to the clear dogma within the community.

> But we need help from everyone. Remember that none of the decisions in Go are infallible; they’re just our best attempts at the time we made them, not wisdom received on stone tablets.

All the butt-hurt oracle trolls that roam hacker news are obviously jealous that a decent language has become more popular than java.

You just can never trust what the go team says.

Yeah, because software is not meant to evolve and people are not meant to either.

You're not meant to gaslight about the evolution of software.

Changing your mind is not gaslighting, people just change their mind sometimes.

It's not this one thing, it's that yhey consistently do this

You're not meant to apply poor man's psychology everywhere just because you have heard about a certain psychological term.

It's a perfectly good term for the overall and historical attitude of the go dev team.