These weren't random internet comments, these were a bunch of well known gatekeepers in the main go mailing list trying to gaslight everybody else and threatening to quit Go if Go ever added generics. Obviously that didn't work and now these people have lost any form of power they thought they have. But these are very public people I won't name here.
> Nobody who mattered said that Go didn't need generics.
Well I guess these people clearly don't matter now, since they are still on the mailing list despite their threats...
> It was always explicitly on the table.
No it wasn't, Rob Pike himself was clearly not interested in adding generics and the effort truly began when Pike left the Go team. Let's not try to rewrite history.
> these were a bunch of well known gatekeepers in the main go mailing list
Celebrity status doesn't make someone's comments any less random.
> Let's not try to rewrite history.
No need to rewrite anything. It was written right on golang.org for most, if not all, of Go's public life. Though obviously no longer relevant these days.
The various generics proposals (eight of them, if I recall correctly) were also published publicly.
> The various generics proposals (eight of them, if I recall correctly) were also published publicly.
And? It doesn't make go generics "always explicitly on the table", Pike didn't want them and it's profusely documented in his blog. So please don't invent facts now.
You can clearly see in the original Go announcement, hosted by Pike, that generics were presented as "not yet". Not "never". Let's not invent facts. It was indicated from public day one that it would get them eventually, even by Pike himself.
As we all know, Pike is a bit of a troll, so nobody is surprised that his random musings said that they'll never come. But it also was never his project to decide. He was involved to some degree, and you can recognize his influence, but it's really Ken Thompson's baby. Griesemer was the only founding member young enough to not want to retire after the initial work was done, so it soon became his to oversee. Not to mention that ultimately the project is owned by Google, who is capable of squashing Pike like a bug if he wasn't acting in the interest of the company's assets.
Officially, generics were always on the table and would come once a suitable implementation was found. And, guess what? A suitable implementation, after a lot of flawed tries, was found and generics came. Imagine that.
Had the open source community wanted generics more perhaps they would have jumped in and helped Taylor where he was struggling to speed up the process, but such is life. Ultimately people don't care, are lazy, and like to make others do the work for them, all while complaining about it the whole way. Google eventually found a domain expert willing to be hired to close the gaps Taylor was struggling with and the rest is history.
These weren't random internet comments, these were a bunch of well known gatekeepers in the main go mailing list trying to gaslight everybody else and threatening to quit Go if Go ever added generics. Obviously that didn't work and now these people have lost any form of power they thought they have. But these are very public people I won't name here.
> Nobody who mattered said that Go didn't need generics.
Well I guess these people clearly don't matter now, since they are still on the mailing list despite their threats...
> It was always explicitly on the table.
No it wasn't, Rob Pike himself was clearly not interested in adding generics and the effort truly began when Pike left the Go team. Let's not try to rewrite history.