4 ms·

Yes, it's a not-uncommon gotcha or foot-gun. No argument there. But, like many other gotchas and foot-guns, they are not too difficult to spot in code review.

• gwd 3y ago
  ...if you have experienced golang developers who have scars on their feet. If you have someone who's an experienced developer but only used golang for a few months, they might not catch it, which means a hard-to-find bug that got into your code. Furthermore, even for experienced developers, there's a limit to how much context / rules / whatever your brain can keep. This footgun takes up space and intellectual energy that could be used for something else. All things being equal, a language that doesn't have this kind of footgun is better than one that does: less experienced reviewers will let fewer bugs slip through, and more experienced reviewers will either spend less effort reviewing (meaning the mental energy can be used somewhere else) or will have more review capacity (meaning they'll find more bugs / improve the code more).