> I am not able to think beyond the end of my nose, therefore we have to stop there" is a silly response.
This is exactly what I mean by needlessly provocative. You're almost directly saying that people who happen to care more about one specific case than you do are stupid or naive rather than having a different technical opinion than you. If you genuinely think that people who disagree with you are stupid or naive, then I don't understand why you'd bother trying to engage with them. If you think they aren't, but their ideas are, I don't think you're going to be effective at trying to educate them by talking down to them like this.
> Nobody has been able to find a design that actually works yet. Which is the same problem we had with generics. Everyone and their brother had half-assed proposals, but all of them fell down to actual use. So, again, who is going to be the person who is able to think about the bigger picture and get it right?
Whether a design "actually works" is dependent on what the actual thing it's trying to solve is, since a design that works for one problem might not solve another. This is still circular; you're defining the problem to be larger than what the proposals were trying to solve, so of course they didn't solve what you're looking for. You're obviously happier with nothing changing if it doesn't solve the general problem, which is a perfectly valid opinion, but you're talking in absolute terms as if anyone who disagrees with you is objectively wrong rather than having a subjectively different view on what the right tradeoff is.
> Philip Wadler may be that person. There is unlikely anyone else in the world with a more relevant background. But, if he has no interest in doing it, you can't exactly force him — can you? It is clearly not you, else you'd have done it already. It isn't me either. I am much too stupid for that kind of thing.
Once again, this is exactly the reason that I'd argue that it's reasonable to consider a solution to a specific subset of the problem than trying to solve it generally. If nobody is capable of solving a large problem, some people will want to solve a small one instead. The issue isn't that I can't personally see beyond the end of my nose, but that unless someone comes up with the solution, it's impossible to tell the difference between whether it's a few hundred yards outside my field of view or light-years away in another galaxy we'll never reach. I'd argue that there should be some threshold where after enough time, it's worth it to stop holding out for a perfect solution and accept one that only solves an immediate obvious problem, and further that we've reached that threshold. You can disagree with that, but condescending to people who don't have the same view as you isn't going to convince anyone, so I don't understand what the point of it is other than if you're just trying to feel smugly superior.
> This is exactly what I mean by needlessly provocative.
This doesn't make sense. You might be mistakenly anthropomorphizing HN?
> so of course they didn't solve what you're looking for.
What I am looking for is irrelevant. They straight up didn't solve the needs of Go. It was not me who rejected them, it was the Go community who rejected them, realizing that they won't work for anyone.
> Once again, this is exactly the reason that I'd argue that it's reasonable to consider a solution to a specific subset of the problem than trying to solve it generally.
The Go project is looking for a subset solution. Nobody knows, even within that subset, of how to make it work.
Which clearly includes you. Me too. Obviously if we had a solution, we'd already be using it. But who?
No matter how much you hope and pray, things cannot magically appear. Someone has to do it.
> This doesn't make sense. You might be mistakenly anthropomorphizing HN?
You're a human talking to other humans. Yes, you're online, but there are still a range of ways you can phrase things, some of which are more polite than others. I don't understand what doesn't make sense about it, although as always you're free to disagree.
> What I am looking for is irrelevant. They straight up didn't solve the needs of Go. It was not me who rejected them, it was the Go community who rejected them, realizing that they won't work for anyone.
Go is not a monolithic community, and for obvious reasons the people making decisions are a much smaller group than the community as a whole. Not everyone in the community will agree with every decision, and my impression is that there's a sizable group of people who would have been happier if one of the proposals had been merged. You're stating it as fact that this isn't the case, and obviously I'm not going to convince you otherwise, but it's clear you don't have any desire to provide any more context because you think your claim is self-evident.
> Which clearly includes you. Me too. Obviously if we had a solution, we'd already be using it. But who?
Sure, if you think that the people who make the language are infallibly able to both know and care about what's good for 100% of Go programmers and every proposal will somehow be either something that will strictly fit what with every single one of them wants or be bad for all of them (regardless of what they say they want). Alternately, maybe there's nuance where different people have competing technical views on what would make sense or disagreeing views on subjective matters, and the lack of a solution having been adopted doesn't mean that it's impossible for someone to think that anything that's been discussed would be a good idea without being objectively wrong. Given that you'd rather refer to any other viewpoint as akin to magical hopes and prayers, you obviously don't think that it's possible anyone else could have something reasonable to say on the issue if it disagrees with your opinions, so I guess we've both been wasting our time here.
> You're a human talking to other humans.
Okay. Let's put that to the test. Describe my human features. What do I look like, sound like?
> and my impression is that there's a sizable group of people who would have been happier if one of the proposals had been merged.
Fair enough. What do they say to the specific criticism that brought rejection?
> Sure, if you think that the people who make the language are infallibly able to both know and care about what's good for 100% of Go programmers
They satisfy 100% of Go programmers, but not all programmers. Those who aren't satisfied are already using another language or have forked Go to make it what they actually need. Even Google uses their own fork, funnily enough. If something doesn't work for you, you can't sensibly continue to use it.