6 ms·

Screen real estate is limited, especially vertical real estate. Compared to languages with saner error handling, I can read approximately 25% as much Go code a

Screen real estate is limited, especially vertical real estate. Compared to languages with saner error handling, I can read approximately 25% as much Go code at once. That's a real cognitive burden when maintaining code or learning your way around a new codebase, which seems especially egregious from a language whose community consistently proselytizes about how the lack of language features is great for maintainability and onboarding. I'd take exceptions any day of the week over Go's solution. I'd much rather the program crash by default than attempt to continue with corrupt data by default. I'd rather have concise, explicit, compiler-required error handling than exceptions, though.

throwaway894345 4y ago
> Screen real estate is limited, especially vertical real estate. Compared to languages with saner error handling, I can read approximately 25% as much Go code at once. In my experience, people can't actually read everything on the screen at one time anyway, and the more dense/terse things are the harder it is to read (otherwise we would minify everything). > I'd much rather the program crash by default than attempt to continue with corrupt data by default. It's not likely that it will continue with corrupt data because you can't use the return value without explicitly ignoring the error. It's not perfect, because there are cases where you want to crash when there is an error but no return value, and Go doesn't help you here. I would like to see this improve, but it's relatively low on my list of qualms with Go (I would rather have sum types, for example). It certainly isn't worth changing languages over especially since, in practice, Go seems to have fewer error handling bugs than exception-based languages.
- mcronce 4y ago
  > In my experience, people can't actually read everything on the screen at one time anyway, and the more dense/terse things are the harder it is to read (otherwise we would minify everything). Whether or not you can read everything on the screen at one time is missing the point entirely. The point is that context matters, and the more frequently you have to scroll to find it is more cognitive burden. > It's not likely that it will continue with corrupt data because you can't use the return value without explicitly ignoring the error. It is far too easy to accidentally do the wrong thing with an error in Go. In Rust, for example, no matter what you want to do with the result of a fallible call, you have to do it explicitly. If you want to crash on error, you `.unwrap()`; if you want to bubble it up, you `?`; if you want to continue with a default value, you `.unwrap_or()` or one of its variants. > in practice, Go seems to have fewer error handling bugs than exception-based languages This is based on?
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    > Whether or not you can read everything on the screen at one time is missing the point entirely. The point is that context matters, and the more frequently you have to scroll to find it is more cognitive burden. And I disagree. Scrolling IMO is a lot easier than squinting to parse dense code. We have visual structure (indentation blocks and so on) for a reason. The visual structure aids in readability, and indentation blocks help the eye scan quickly over a document. The visual structure in most languages resembles control flow, except some languages make an exception (no pun intended) to this rule for error handling paths which are not easy to see at a glance. > This is based on? My experience.
    - throw10920 4y ago
      > Scrolling IMO is a lot easier than squinting to parse dense code. This is a false dichotomy - there's a third option, which is not squinting (because, presumably, you're doing so because you decreased your font size), and being able to see more on the screen at the same time. Moreover, scrolling is bad for cognition. It's pretty well-known that the human brain likes to use spatial maps - that's the reason why memory palaces are so effective. Scrolling decreases the ability of the brain to make spatial maps compared to, well, not scrolling. > The point is that context matters, and the more frequently you have to scroll to find it is more cognitive burden. This is not something you can "disagree" on - divorcing information from context always leads to more cognitive burden.
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
        > This is a false dichotomy - there's a third option, which is not squinting (because, presumably, you're doing so because you decreased your font size), and being able to see more on the screen at the same time. It's not a false dichotomy. Visual structure (via whitespace) comes at the expense of strict information density (assuming a fixed font size). If this is not true, then we would never have any (syntactically insignificant) whitespace. > This is not something you can "disagree" on - divorcing information from context always leads to more cognitive burden. Agreed, but this supports my point. It's a lot easier to scroll and scan visual structure than it is to reparse dense code. Density divorces us from context a lot more than physical distance on a screen.
sleepybrett 4y ago
> Screen real estate is limited, especially vertical real estate. meh, my ide squashes short if `err != nil` clauses (goland, but I've seen other editors/ides/golang plugins do this as well ), also I run a vertical monitor. It's just not enough of an issue to care about. I've seen similar features for editors for other languages that have features or patterns that also create a lot of 'extra bullshit that takes up screen realestate'.
b3morales 4y ago
Additionally, the more repetitive code there is, the more opportunities there are for some subtle difference to be lurking in one particular chunk. And with pervasive boilerplate it becomes easier to eyeglaze past that subtle difference. Whether that difference is a bug or intentional, it's important to have code that highlights it by default.
lamontcg 4y ago
I don't think "screen real estate" is the right argument here. The problem is just that every line creates cognitive load and there's a tradeoff between concision and descriptiveness. A language with piles of syntactic sugar and magic gets it wrong with too much concision and can read like line noise when it gets overused. Go goes the other way though and makes it way too verbose and just makes it difficult to read the code. When a method needs to have 6 different error handling clauses in it, then it isn't as clear that 5 of those just bubble up the error while one of them has some unique handling. It also increases the chances that some programmer copypastas the boilerplate bubble-up code to all six of those cases and it sails through PR review. You can write a static analysis linter to force programmers to always handle errors and not ignore them, but you can't force them to handle errors correctly. When humans are reading the code, concision helps and verbosity hurts -- up until that crossover point where magic causes readability to suffer. Go programmers seem to focus on abhoring magic and rejecting the benefits of concision. But when it comes to PR review your job is to stare at the whole method (or the whole file) and be able to "see" the bug, and more lines of code will make this job more difficult (and is also why some of the recommendations of the "clean code" book are pretty bad since extracting more tiny little methods can harm overall readability). There's a happy optimum somewhere where cognitive load is minimized. That isn't attained though by just having the simplest language design possible and offloading complexity into more verbose code.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I disagree. IMO, there's much more cognitive load in parsing dense, "minified" code than there is in scanning code whose control flow mirrors its visual structure. Humans are very good at seeing visual structure (which is why we tend to indent, split code across lines, and other syntactically insignificant usage of whitespace). By convention in most mainstream programming languages, this visual structure mirrors code flow, so we can see the control flow at a glance; however, many languages have special hidden control flow (exceptions) or control flow which is otherwise isn't part of the visual structure and thus easily overlooked at a glance (e.g., Rust's `?`). In my opinion, this "hidden" control flow allows more errors to slip past reviewers (though some languages might recoup some quality by other means).

throwaway894345 4y ago

> Screen real estate is limited, especially vertical real estate. Compared to languages with saner error handling, I can read approximately 25% as much Go code at once. In my experience, people can't actually read everything on the screen at one time anyway, and the more dense/terse things are the harder it is to read (otherwise we would minify everything). > I'd much rather the program crash by default than attempt to continue with corrupt data by default. It's not likely that it will continue with corrupt data because you can't use the return value without explicitly ignoring the error. It's not perfect, because there are cases where you want to crash when there is an error but no return value, and Go doesn't help you here. I would like to see this improve, but it's relatively low on my list of qualms with Go (I would rather have sum types, for example). It certainly isn't worth changing languages over especially since, in practice, Go seems to have fewer error handling bugs than exception-based languages.

mcronce 4y ago
> In my experience, people can't actually read everything on the screen at one time anyway, and the more dense/terse things are the harder it is to read (otherwise we would minify everything). Whether or not you can read everything on the screen at one time is missing the point entirely. The point is that context matters, and the more frequently you have to scroll to find it is more cognitive burden. > It's not likely that it will continue with corrupt data because you can't use the return value without explicitly ignoring the error. It is far too easy to accidentally do the wrong thing with an error in Go. In Rust, for example, no matter what you want to do with the result of a fallible call, you have to do it explicitly. If you want to crash on error, you `.unwrap()`; if you want to bubble it up, you `?`; if you want to continue with a default value, you `.unwrap_or()` or one of its variants. > in practice, Go seems to have fewer error handling bugs than exception-based languages This is based on?
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  > Whether or not you can read everything on the screen at one time is missing the point entirely. The point is that context matters, and the more frequently you have to scroll to find it is more cognitive burden. And I disagree. Scrolling IMO is a lot easier than squinting to parse dense code. We have visual structure (indentation blocks and so on) for a reason. The visual structure aids in readability, and indentation blocks help the eye scan quickly over a document. The visual structure in most languages resembles control flow, except some languages make an exception (no pun intended) to this rule for error handling paths which are not easy to see at a glance. > This is based on? My experience.
  - throw10920 4y ago
    > Scrolling IMO is a lot easier than squinting to parse dense code. This is a false dichotomy - there's a third option, which is not squinting (because, presumably, you're doing so because you decreased your font size), and being able to see more on the screen at the same time. Moreover, scrolling is bad for cognition. It's pretty well-known that the human brain likes to use spatial maps - that's the reason why memory palaces are so effective. Scrolling decreases the ability of the brain to make spatial maps compared to, well, not scrolling. > The point is that context matters, and the more frequently you have to scroll to find it is more cognitive burden. This is not something you can "disagree" on - divorcing information from context always leads to more cognitive burden.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      > This is a false dichotomy - there's a third option, which is not squinting (because, presumably, you're doing so because you decreased your font size), and being able to see more on the screen at the same time. It's not a false dichotomy. Visual structure (via whitespace) comes at the expense of strict information density (assuming a fixed font size). If this is not true, then we would never have any (syntactically insignificant) whitespace. > This is not something you can "disagree" on - divorcing information from context always leads to more cognitive burden. Agreed, but this supports my point. It's a lot easier to scroll and scan visual structure than it is to reparse dense code. Density divorces us from context a lot more than physical distance on a screen.

sleepybrett 4y ago

> Screen real estate is limited, especially vertical real estate. meh, my ide squashes short if `err != nil` clauses (goland, but I've seen other editors/ides/golang plugins do this as well ), also I run a vertical monitor. It's just not enough of an issue to care about. I've seen similar features for editors for other languages that have features or patterns that also create a lot of 'extra bullshit that takes up screen realestate'.

b3morales 4y ago

Additionally, the more repetitive code there is, the more opportunities there are for some subtle difference to be lurking in one particular chunk. And with pervasive boilerplate it becomes easier to eyeglaze past that subtle difference. Whether that difference is a bug or intentional, it's important to have code that highlights it by default.

lamontcg 4y ago

I don't think "screen real estate" is the right argument here. The problem is just that every line creates cognitive load and there's a tradeoff between concision and descriptiveness. A language with piles of syntactic sugar and magic gets it wrong with too much concision and can read like line noise when it gets overused. Go goes the other way though and makes it way too verbose and just makes it difficult to read the code. When a method needs to have 6 different error handling clauses in it, then it isn't as clear that 5 of those just bubble up the error while one of them has some unique handling. It also increases the chances that some programmer copypastas the boilerplate bubble-up code to all six of those cases and it sails through PR review. You can write a static analysis linter to force programmers to always handle errors and not ignore them, but you can't force them to handle errors correctly. When humans are reading the code, concision helps and verbosity hurts -- up until that crossover point where magic causes readability to suffer. Go programmers seem to focus on abhoring magic and rejecting the benefits of concision. But when it comes to PR review your job is to stare at the whole method (or the whole file) and be able to "see" the bug, and more lines of code will make this job more difficult (and is also why some of the recommendations of the "clean code" book are pretty bad since extracting more tiny little methods can harm overall readability). There's a happy optimum somewhere where cognitive load is minimized. That isn't attained though by just having the simplest language design possible and offloading complexity into more verbose code.

throwaway894345 4y ago
I disagree. IMO, there's much more cognitive load in parsing dense, "minified" code than there is in scanning code whose control flow mirrors its visual structure. Humans are very good at seeing visual structure (which is why we tend to indent, split code across lines, and other syntactically insignificant usage of whitespace). By convention in most mainstream programming languages, this visual structure mirrors code flow, so we can see the control flow at a glance; however, many languages have special hidden control flow (exceptions) or control flow which is otherwise isn't part of the visual structure and thus easily overlooked at a glance (e.g., Rust's `?`). In my opinion, this "hidden" control flow allows more errors to slip past reviewers (though some languages might recoup some quality by other means).