Your comment is illustrative of a lack of awareness of context. You don't specify the context, but it seems like you're stuck in this academic/language theory mindset. From that standpoint, I rather like generics. It's clear to see how they can enable DRY if used judiciously. (Clear from even a freshman CS undergrad perspective.)
However, as a professional who gets paid to wrangle C++, I find the "Tragedy of the Commons" that results from every bright-eyed recent grad wanting to leave their mark on a system...tiresome. I recently fixed a bug caused by a small find-replace mistake, where a static_cast<int> was left out, resulting in an int() operator being generated by a confluence of preprocessor macros, inlined functions, and composed templates, where the call breaking in the stack trace was expressed nowhere in the code-base. It's one thing to DRY, but taking it one step too far to "Don't State Yourself In The First Place" is way too implicit. Abstractions have a cost, and sometimes the cost is epiphenomenal and gets paid years afterwards.
An argument from ignorance isn't much of an argument.
The decision of the Go team to not include generics is conservative and pragmatic. The context they consider is across an entire language community, and their decision is informed by observations made on code-bases at Google and elsewhere. How many 500k+ line code bases that have been around more than a decade have you worked on? I'm on something like my 4th. My conclusion from that is that we programmers as a group are mostly too anxious to be "clever" and biased towards doing too much when they evaluate the cost-benefit of "clever."
Do you have good data/experience on the epiphenomenal harm done by many, many "clever" programmers over years?
Ah, so you can't argue with me, so you're going to try the ol' appeal to authority ("i've worked on such big code bases that you'll never see").
You seem to assume I'm some naive recent grad. I've worked on more than a few 500k LOC applications. I'm a lead at a very large tech company (Fortune 50). The idea that '"clever"' programmers is a thing is incorrect.
There are good programmers and bad programmers. It doesn't matter if the lack of abstraction used by one type creates a monolithic mess of spaghetti code or if they use overly obscure attempts at abstraction. Bad code causes technical debt either way, and I've seen both done quite often.
Ah, so you can't argue with me, so you're going to try the ol' appeal to authority ("i've worked on such big code bases that you'll never see").
Uh, no. I asked if you understand such a context and if you have such data. Going by what you state, you do. A simple "yes" would have sufficed, and you could have left out the projection. Thank you for including the projection, as it is another valuable "signal."
The idea that '"clever"' programmers is a thing is incorrect.
There are good programmers and bad programmers.
Bad code causes technical debt either way, and I've seen both done quite often.
You do understand the use of quotes, then? "Clever" programming is thought to be clever by the perpetrator, but is actually bad programming and comprises technical debt. So either you are contradicting yourself above, or you are implying that "bad programmers" know they are bad, but do bad things anyways? This doesn't fit my experience.
However, as a professional who gets paid to wrangle C++, I find the "Tragedy of the Commons" that results from every bright-eyed recent grad wanting to leave their mark on a system...tiresome. I recently fixed a bug caused by a small find-replace mistake, where a static_cast<int> was left out, resulting in an int() operator being generated by a confluence of preprocessor macros, inlined functions, and composed templates, where the call breaking in the stack trace was expressed nowhere in the code-base. It's one thing to DRY, but taking it one step too far to "Don't State Yourself In The First Place" is way too implicit. Abstractions have a cost, and sometimes the cost is epiphenomenal and gets paid years afterwards.
An argument from ignorance isn't much of an argument.
The decision of the Go team to not include generics is conservative and pragmatic. The context they consider is across an entire language community, and their decision is informed by observations made on code-bases at Google and elsewhere. How many 500k+ line code bases that have been around more than a decade have you worked on? I'm on something like my 4th. My conclusion from that is that we programmers as a group are mostly too anxious to be "clever" and biased towards doing too much when they evaluate the cost-benefit of "clever."
Do you have good data/experience on the epiphenomenal harm done by many, many "clever" programmers over years?