4 ms·

Agreed. This was the only nit I was inclined to pick as well. I have a lot of fun writing Go, because it gets out of my way.

afdbcreid 5y ago
But programming languages should get on your way while you're doing things wrong. Go does not. To be fare, most mainstream languages do not: I think Rust is the best in this thing, other languages often aren't. But Go is by far the worst of all, because of its striving for "simplicity".
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > But programming languages should get on your way while you're doing things wrong. Go does not. To be fare, most mainstream languages do not: I think Rust is the best in this thing, other languages often aren't. But Go is by far the worst of all, because of its striving for "simplicity". Go typically does get in your way when you're doing things wrong, but yes, I'd like to see Go require return values be dealt with or explicitly ignored. That said, there are linters for this, but in practice it's never been a material problem for me so I haven't bothered to wire one into my project. Over time, I've learned not to be so concerned about issues which are mostly just theoretical--there are enough practical problems to deal with first.
  - yencabulator 5y ago
    > I'd like to see Go require return values be dealt with or explicitly ignored. Ever use the return value from fmt.Println?
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      Not usually, but the correct answer would be to either explicitly ignore the unused return values or use APIs that don't return values you don't care about.
      - preseinger 5y ago
        _ = fmt.Println("ok") // 1 fmt.Println("ok") // 2 1 is unambiguously worse than 2.
reedjosh 5y ago
I just can't stand taking three lines to unpack a value from a map or to return if error. Why can't I just say `return if err := somefunc(); err != nil` It's mega frustrating on top of the lack of generics and other abstractions. And now that generics are coming about, I'm sure it will take forever until my current project can use them. My current project is in the k8s ecosystem which due to the lack of generics, implemented its own clever but awful type system.
- preseinger 5y ago
  The problem here is that you think "error handling" is somehow different, and probably less important, than normal logic in your codebase. But Go asserts that the "sad path" is just as important as the "happy path".
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I can't relate. Newline characters have never been burdensome to me, and they aid in visual structure (the control flow is represented by the visual structure of the program, not only for "good data" paths, but also for error paths). My programming problems are usually not related to localized keystroke boilerplate, but rather larger issues of abstraction and data modeling. > My current project is in the k8s ecosystem which due to the lack of generics, implemented its own clever but awful type system. The k8s ecosystem's type system is unrelated to generics. It has a concept of user-defined resource types, which means that users can provide an OpenAPI document describing their resource type which Kubernetes will then use to validate new user-provided resources of a given type. From the perspective of the Go compiler, these types are dynamic types--they can't be known at compile time. They aren't a candidate for generics in the host language. That said, it's often tedious to write a controller for these resource types, but that's because Kubernetes' controller frameworks are really complicated. They remind me of enterprise Java code with gratuitous abstraction. Maybe that abstraction serves some purpose, but it wasn't helping me and I ended up rewriting much of it in more standard Go (I didn't release it because it was prototype code and I didn't want to support it) and it was quite a lot simpler. I don't recall seeing many places where I felt that generics would be a significant improvement, but it's been a while.

afdbcreid 5y ago

But programming languages should get on your way while you're doing things wrong. Go does not. To be fare, most mainstream languages do not: I think Rust is the best in this thing, other languages often aren't. But Go is by far the worst of all, because of its striving for "simplicity".

throwaway894345 5y ago
> But programming languages should get on your way while you're doing things wrong. Go does not. To be fare, most mainstream languages do not: I think Rust is the best in this thing, other languages often aren't. But Go is by far the worst of all, because of its striving for "simplicity". Go typically does get in your way when you're doing things wrong, but yes, I'd like to see Go require return values be dealt with or explicitly ignored. That said, there are linters for this, but in practice it's never been a material problem for me so I haven't bothered to wire one into my project. Over time, I've learned not to be so concerned about issues which are mostly just theoretical--there are enough practical problems to deal with first.
- yencabulator 5y ago
  > I'd like to see Go require return values be dealt with or explicitly ignored. Ever use the return value from fmt.Println?
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Not usually, but the correct answer would be to either explicitly ignore the unused return values or use APIs that don't return values you don't care about.
    - preseinger 5y ago
      _ = fmt.Println("ok") // 1 fmt.Println("ok") // 2 1 is unambiguously worse than 2.

reedjosh 5y ago

I just can't stand taking three lines to unpack a value from a map or to return if error. Why can't I just say `return if err := somefunc(); err != nil` It's mega frustrating on top of the lack of generics and other abstractions. And now that generics are coming about, I'm sure it will take forever until my current project can use them. My current project is in the k8s ecosystem which due to the lack of generics, implemented its own clever but awful type system.

preseinger 5y ago
The problem here is that you think "error handling" is somehow different, and probably less important, than normal logic in your codebase. But Go asserts that the "sad path" is just as important as the "happy path".
throwaway894345 5y ago
I can't relate. Newline characters have never been burdensome to me, and they aid in visual structure (the control flow is represented by the visual structure of the program, not only for "good data" paths, but also for error paths). My programming problems are usually not related to localized keystroke boilerplate, but rather larger issues of abstraction and data modeling. > My current project is in the k8s ecosystem which due to the lack of generics, implemented its own clever but awful type system. The k8s ecosystem's type system is unrelated to generics. It has a concept of user-defined resource types, which means that users can provide an OpenAPI document describing their resource type which Kubernetes will then use to validate new user-provided resources of a given type. From the perspective of the Go compiler, these types are dynamic types--they can't be known at compile time. They aren't a candidate for generics in the host language. That said, it's often tedious to write a controller for these resource types, but that's because Kubernetes' controller frameworks are really complicated. They remind me of enterprise Java code with gratuitous abstraction. Maybe that abstraction serves some purpose, but it wasn't helping me and I ended up rewriting much of it in more standard Go (I didn't release it because it was prototype code and I didn't want to support it) and it was quite a lot simpler. I don't recall seeing many places where I felt that generics would be a significant improvement, but it's been a while.