> I wonder what the point of railing against a lack of generics is. When I sit down to write Go, I know that I will be writing a lot of simple, yet repetitive code.

Your second sentence answers your first. Not everyone likes writing the same code over and over again, even if it's simple code.

> generics seem like a pretty easy thing to write a preprocessor for

Very funny. But even if it were possible, the bigger problem with using a preprocessor is that everyone ends up using their own incompatible generics preprocessor.