📰 Golang Approves Generics, While Python Accepts Pattern-Matching Proposals

From today's "This Week in Programming" column: Rejoice, long at last, all you Gophers, for the question of whether or not the Go programming language will adopt generics has finally, after many years of debate, been answered this week with the acceptance of a proposal made last month. In this most recent proposal, Golang team member Ian Lance Taylor writes that generics have been "one of the most commonly requested language features" since the language was first released in 2009, but even then, it's adoption doesn't come without concerns. Taylor explains the idea of generics in the intro of his proposal: "Generics can give us powerful building blocks that let us share code and build programs more easily. Generic programming means writing functions and data structures where some types are left to be specified later. For example, you can write a function that operates on a slice of some arbitrary data type, where the actual data type is only specified when the function is called. Or, you can define a data structure that stores values of any type, where the actual type to be stored is specified when you create an instance of the data structure." It is precisely this value proposition — being able to write reusable code — that excites some developers and has been behind the push all along... Generics wasn't the only controversial programming language addition this week, with the Python Steering Council making the decision to accept a number of Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) collectively known as the Pattern Matching PEPs. "We acknowledge that Pattern Matching is an extensive change to Python and that reaching consensus across the entire community is close to impossible," the council writes, saying that, nonetheless, they "are confident that Pattern Matching as specified in PEP 634, et al, will be a great addition to the Python language." One dissenter to the addition found their way to the pages of iProgrammer, with the snarky headline "Python Adopts Pattern Matching — Kitchen Sink Next." In other news, Google increased its support for the Python Software Foundation with a donation of more than $350,000 to support three specific projects, and also says it will continue its donation of Google Cloud infrastructure to the foundation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.