My experience from scala is that the use of generics is not an afterthought, not a boilerplate abstraction. They’re come in handy naturally when one knows how to use them, and it is not rocket science.
The real benefit of generics. They enable composability. The complete scala collections library is the best example of that. The benefit is non-obvious on a single function level, a complete program is another story.
It’s, of course, possible to to achieve something like this with golang and interface{}. I don’t mind working with it, all the type switches and what not make feel like a proper tinkerer! What is actually happening:, I’m wasting my time, the compiler already knows all the types. It can figure things out for me. Of course, a sound type system is then needed.
The types switches are error prone, it’s like working with java.lang.Object everywhere. And if I can avoid all these “GetX” functions, where X is “String”, “Int”, “Int32”, “Int64” and so on, even better. Just look at viper, it would be so clean and lightweight with generics.
