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Often when we talk about verbosity in a language, we mean something is needlessly descriptive in a way that can make things tedious or hard to maintain. Just y
by PaulRobinson 7y ago
Often when we talk about verbosity in a language, we mean something is needlessly descriptive in a way that can make things tedious or hard to maintain.
Just yesterday I made the joke that you can recognise a Java developer at a party because they start almost every sentence with "public static void". Ha. See, funny?
Go's verbosity feels different, and I don't think it's "verbose". It's clear. It's about making it really clear what is happening.
What surprises me about the proposal is that they think that go's error handling does not reduce the number of errors, because in my experience it does in fact reduce the incidence of run-time errors significantly, and also makes it very clear how to maintain error handling code.
I'm not sure I like the try proposal, but I'm not sure I hate it. What I do know is that the verbosity you're complaining about doesn't feel to me like the same kind of verbosity I complain about in other languages, somehow.
- keypusher 7y ago> It's about making it really clear what is happening. You could say the same thing about Java, so your argument basically boils down into “I like Go, and I don’t like Java”. What is clear and important to one person is needlessly verbose to another, what is cryptic to a newcomer might be beautiful and concise to an expert. I’ve encountered idioms that horrified me the first time I saw them which I eventually grew to love, and I’ve been smitten by syntax sugar that I thought would be great and turned out to be a disaster. It’s hard to know how stuff like this will play out, every language evolves its own style and rhythm over time, and sometimes it takes reading and writing a lot of code to find the right balance.