anaconda

n/#RawMessage [1] https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda/blob/master/users.g...

language itself. In other words, they're not out there writing alternative solutions because they genuinely don't perceive a lack of generics to be as big of a problem as other things, which they do write tools for. Secondly, there is a way to use interface{} to accomplish some (not all) of the same things that generics do, while still preserving type safety. Look at the functions in this Twitter client library I wrote: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda/blob/master/users.g... All the endpoints use the same apiGet() function ("generic"), but they all return concrete types, and they are all typesafe - you will never get a runtime panic from any of those functions. This is more than Java's generics guarantee, due to the quirks of the way type erasure works there[1]. No, this isn't "generics", but it provides an alternative way of solving the problem most of the time (in practice), and isn't that what matters? And yes, this is not quite as clean as some languages which focus on having a very expressive and precise type system (ML, Haskell, etc.), but it provides enough type safety for me without requiring me to think consciously about the types that I am using (which I have to do when writing ML or Scala). [0] I mean people who write primarily Go at least 4-5 days a week, for work, as opposed to people who dabble with it for side projects but primarily use other languages. [1] TL;DR: Java's generics are converted to "Object" after compilation, which means that you can actually end up with runtime type errors that are detectable at compiletime, due to inheritance. (It's been a while since I used Java, so I won't provide an example, but they're easy to find online).

ks that make it cumbersome in general, irrespective of language[2]. That said, Go was by far the easiest to work with here, because channels allowed me to abstract the pagination and the rate-limiting in a way that it would be invisible to all callers, but "magically" handled behind the scenes. Without going into too much detail, I can see that the way OP has designed his code looks a bit cumbersome. That said, while it's a reasonable way of approaching it, I don't think it's actually the best approach in Go given the language's idioms. One other thing I want to draw attention to is the use of the general-purpose function for issuing a GET request to Twitter, and how that is shared among the various functions that use it to return values of varying, but known, types. I don't want to use the word "generic" here because people expect a certain thing when they hear that word, but I will say that this function is (A) general-purpose, and (B) type-safe - it involves no type assertions, and the functions all return concrete types instead if interface{}. [0] https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda/ [1] Don't get me started on this [2] I've written client libraries for Twitter in a few different languages, so I actually have a reasonable point of reference on this - at one point, it was my personal "hello world" for testing out a new language.