My guess as to why people in Java use generics so much and switched to them so quickly is the squiggly yellow lines in their IDEs. A lot of Java code is easier to read/write with explicit and implicit casting and no use of generics. And the type erasure makes for sometimes unintuitive behavior at runtime. Being familiar with Java, I appreciate Go's skepticism toward generics because maybe just maybe they'll figure out a way to add them after the fact in an elegant way.