It is not essential, but without it, it is much more cumbersome. I programmed it with Java so I know it can be done but I would not choose a language without it if I could.

It is absolutely necessary nowadays, yes. Our applications are often more complex than what people did in Java 1.5, Cobol, or C, and definitely need to be developed at a faster pace.

and during last 20 years consensus has converged to the view point that generics are essential.

Huh. Guess I'm heterodox, then.

I mean, don't get me wrong. It's quite useful once in a while, especially when working with containers, but I don't think of it as essential.

But I'm fine with it as long as people don't overdo it.

Rolling your own containers really really sucks. Sucks enough to the point that it is essential, in my books.

Maybe I should be more clear.

This thread was in the context of go generics, which generally means go 1.18, when user defined generics were added to the language. Go always had support for a minimal number of containers, I've never rolled my own when working in the language.

Go had special compiler support for slices, maps, and channels before then, and they got used as the default containers for everything.

Using those was annoying when you needed to do the same thing to, say, a slice of strings and a slice of ints, but if you aren't using a generic heavy style, it actually comes up surprisingly rarely. And, if I'm being honest, I'd consider most of the uses of generics I've seen the average enterprise dev use to be mistakes.