I just have to quote Pike's comments:

"Early in the rollout of Go I was told by someone that he could not imagine working in a language without generic types. As I have reported elsewhere, I found that an odd remark.

"To be fair he was probably saying in his own way that he really liked what the STL does for him in C++. For the purpose of argument, though, let's take his claim at face value.

"What it says is that he finds writing containers like lists of ints and maps of strings an unbearable burden. I find that an odd claim. I spend very little of my programming time struggling with those issues, even in languages without generic types.

"But more important, what it says is that types are the way to lift that burden. Types. Not polymorphic functions or language primitives or helpers of other kinds, but types."

1. STL != generic types.

2. Lists of ints and maps of strings are hardly an unbearable burden; everyone and their dogs have been doing those in C for decades. But "string" is a poor universal data type. "int" is even worse. On the other hand, if "lists of ints and maps of strings" is your benchmark, you'll likely never understand that.

3. If you can confuse polymorphic functions, language primitives, or "helpers of other kinds" with types, you're probably doing something wrong. (Polymorphic functions, disjoint from types? I think I get what he's saying, but I need to ponder it some more.)

Pike comes out of a tradition, and his work is in some way the apotheosis of that tradition. The issue is that people confuse the dogma they were raised in with truth, and say stupid things like " ... To be fair he was probably saying in his own way that he really liked what the STL does for him in C++."

or Clean (1987)