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I majored in computer engineering and only touched embedded C and assembly (and MATLAB). I later picked up Go when I wanted to write code to run on regular computers. I never actually touched generics until they were being introduced to Go and I genuinely didn't realize what they could be used for.

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Computer engineering and computer science are different fields. A computer science degree generally requires a semester of programming language theory, which likely includes talking about generics (along with a bunch of more obscure ideas).

Having said that, when presented in a PL class, the main conclusion you will come to is that generics in OOP languages are somewhere between completly broken and very confusing. In practice this doesn't come up that often, because most developers instinctivly avoid thd theoretical pitfalls.

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