Canadian Go Programming

Someone discovers what looks like generic syntax in Go (a language famously without generics at the time), only to learn the most beautifully cursed truth: those aren't angle brackets—they're characters from the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Unicode block that are technically valid in Go identifiers.

So instead of actual generics, this developer created a "template" file using these visually identical characters and just does find-and-replace to generate monomorphized code. It's the programming equivalent of "we have generics at home."

The real kicker? Go's identifier rules allow these Unicode characters, so from the compiler's perspective, ImmutableTreeList<ElementT> is just one long, perfectly valid identifier name. The reaction "Oh my god" says it all—this is simultaneously genius and an absolute crime against readability.

Peak developer ingenuity meets Unicode shenanigans. Before Go 1.18 added actual generics, people were getting creative.