On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:38:46 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
On Friday, 9 May 2014 at 07:05:59 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
Well, he had previously stated that there would be no
breaking changes, and that if there were changes it would
have to be called "go version 2 or something". So when
generics were brought up he stated that there were no plans
for generics and "I said we are going to leave the language,
we are done" (with version 1 semantics).
Ola..
Robert Pike says in this thread
(https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=de#!topic/golang-nuts/3fOIZ1VLn1o):
"Go has type switches, and therefore no need for the Visitor
Pattern.". He has exactly the same mindset as Niklaus Wirth
and Oberon never got templates. Future will tell... Would be a
nice thing to bet a dime on whether Go will have generics or
not. I bet not ;-).
Oberon did eventually get some basic form of templates in
Active Oberon, but that was not under Wirth's supervision.
He actually went into the other direction by making a
minimalist version of Oberon with Oberon-07.
I had the opportunity to meet Wirth at CERN, when he and a few
ETHZ members took part on the Oberon Day, back in 2004.
He is really great guy, but he could not understand why Oberon
was being ignored in the industry. As he expected the desire
for quality would drive developers to it.
In a similar vein to Rob Pike writing the blog post why he
thinks C++ developers don't care for Go, Niklaus Wirth wrote a
long article about the industry lack of interest in minimalist
languages.
The problem they fail to understand, or acknowledge, is that
large scale architectures in simple languages usually lead to
complex code with lots of boilerplate.
--
Paulo
With generics you mean templates, right? I started to use
templates in D, although I wasn't convinced. But the more I use
them the more I appreciate them. If you work with one or two
basic types, templates don't seem to make much sense. But when
you use the power of D, like having arrays of structs that hold
arrays of structs etc., then templates start to make sense.
The thing is, the language has to be designed in a way that
templates make sense and can be used throughout the language. If
not, better not to introduce them. D, at a certain point in time,
started to be designed around templates, or with templates in
mind. I think it was Andrei who convinced Walter to do that. But
in my view the language has to cater for templates for them to be
useful. Introducing them randomly for the sake of having them
will not work.
