[sseth]

The talk by Philip Wadler is one of the most insightful I have heard : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq0WFigax_c

In brief, they are following a process of stripping Go to the most basic possible syntax, and then adding generics (Featherweight). Then they will add more features back and build up to the full language, ending with Cruiserweight where channels will be addressed.

The generics proposal builds on interfaces rather than contracts. Wadler sees Go occupying a unique space in terms of supporting "open supertypes" in the sense that in Go we do not have to declare a struct to be of a particular interface type it is automatically derived based on the methods defined on the struct. This allows a proposal which allows Go to be extended tp solve the "expression problem" first defined by Wadler in 98.

I really hope these beautiful ideas turn out to be workable - I am sure Go will gain immensely if they are well thought out.