I think this is too little, too late. Anyone who saw an advantage to using generic programming is already using something else. They've already invested resources in something besides Go; why spend the effort to switch back for what will, at best, probably be very mediocre support for parametricity compared to whatever they're already using?
b) any of those people you mention aren't using go for some things and other things where this feature is desired
c) that the feature will 'at best' be at level X
d) that level X won't be enough to satisfy some use cases
and a whole host of other things, not least of which the fact that go itself was invented to suit some purpose after other languages existed, and has been successful for many users
The opposite side of that coin is that other programming languages do already exist.
Any new language is already playing catch-up to reach the state of the art. Go is 10 years old and in those 10 years has made astonishingly little progress at implementing basic features such as error handling, because the designers cannot escape their bubble.
The most sensible thing to do is to kill Go, not to improve it. The root problem is not the lack of this or that feature, but the bizarre beliefs of the people running the project.
> The most sensible thing to do is to kill Go, not to improve it.
Care to expand this? It's pretty clear that you don't find Go suitable for your own use cases, but I've found it to be an extremely productive language, despite the fact that it may have a couple of warts.
Humanity is at an incredibly high extinction risk. We have all sorts of incredible new technologies that could, at the very least, knock us back to pre-industrial society. They might just kill us outright.
We've already used all the easily accessible high-energy fuels, so if our current industrial society falls apart, we will probably never build another one.
If we don't get to space now, we will probably never get to space. Then it's only a matter of time until we get hit by an asteroid.
Or we'll just get killed by an engineered supervirus and skip the whole pre-industrial decay phase.
Insurance against what? Lets assume a self supporting mars colony today, and that the asteroid hits earth tomorrow making humans extinct. Will the mars colony get off mars in time to avoid their asteroid? It seems to me that we need to get to a few earth like planets before we can assume survival.
Mars is only the spearhead for further stellar and maybe even interstellar colonization, after all, we gotta start somewhere don't we?
Once we manage to do Mars, by gaining knowledge, developing technologies and maybe even discovering new resources, we can hedge humanities survival further by applying this experience to colonizing other places in space.
There's a lot of it there, but it's hard to extract without modern technology. There's a little peat (arguably the most accessible type of high-energy fuel) left in the British Isles and Finland, but coal is requiring progressively more and more modern effort to extract.
Not really. Wikipedia says that the USGS extimates that "At a price of $60/ton, roughly half (48%) of the coal is economic to produce." Current prices are near $10 a ton so only highly mechanized shallow strip mining techniques are profitable. Coal is about as valuable as other bulk earth products like sand and gravel. 19th century techniques could easily mine most of this coal. It is shipping, not extraction, that determines the price of coal at a given point on Earth. Civilization might need to restart near the mines, but there are still many of those places left.
I personally would vote in favor of putting space exploration on hold until we get a handle on the quickly accelerating environmental disaster we humans have set up that seems that it may just wipe ourselves out.
Personally.
One needs beauty in the world, yes, but one also needs to breathe.
This doesn't make any sense though, as there's no reason they should be exclusive priorities. I, personally, would vote in favor of putting many things on hold until we increase humanity's resilience to catastrophic events by settling on other planets, but I recognize that priorities aren't mutually exclusive.
Anyway, what's the point of focusing all efforts on Earth if human civilization is going to die out here anyway? That's the path we're currently on, and stopping space exploration isn't going to magically fix that. Wanting other baskets for the egg of human civilization is just pragmatism.
Environmentalists will never be satisfied. There is always something to improve.
If humanity dies or goes pre-industrial because someone engineered a supervirus and we refused to put effort into space travel, all our conservation efforts won't really matter much.
Back in college I donated sperm for money. It's not like I was forced into it; it was just nice to have an extra source of income besides my student job.
This also enables sperm banks to retain recurrent donors, which means they can afford to do very rigorous testing amortized over several dozen sperm samples. DNA screening, urine tests, blood tests, etc. That wouldn't be viable under the blood donation model. I've donated blood 5 or 6 times but I doubt even that's enough to make it worth the kind of testing they did on me as a sperm donor.
Sperm banks manage to get very high quality, sanitary sperm despite many people doing it for the cash. The trick is to have recurrent donors you can test regularly, and to quarantine samples until they can be cleared in bulk.
