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The difference is, there is no room for bugs with ?. Zero. None. I have fixed (and frankly, caused) many bugs in golang code where people’s brains “turned off

The difference is, there is no room for bugs with ?. Zero. None. I have fixed (and frankly, caused) many bugs in golang code where people’s brains “turned off the noise” and filtered out the copypasta’d error handling, which overwrote the wrong variable name or didn’t actually bubble up the error or actually had subtly wrong logic in the conditional part which was obscured by the noise. Frankly, learning to ignore that 80% of your code is redundant noise feels to me like a symptom of Stockholm syndrome more than anything else. One symbol to replace three lines of identical boilerplate is no less explicit and dramatically clearer.

jicea 2y ago
It's even nicer in Rust: there can be an "implicit" conversion between the error raised by foo and bar: fn foo() -> Result<(),FooError> bar()? fn bar() -> Result<(),BarError> If FooError can be created from BarError, the compiler will insert the conversion call and errors bubbles up nicely.
johnisgood 2y ago
Is it not caught by the compiler or linter though? Even variable shadowing is caught.
- stouset 2y ago
  Some things are. Some things aren’t. At one point, you could write nil, err without the return and it would happily compile. It’s also tragically easy for actual logic bugs to be obscured by all the boilerplate. It’s not like three lines of error handling copypasta is some optimal amount. If golang required ten lines of boilerplate error handling, you’d still have just as many people arguing in favor of it because they “like it to be explicit” when it reality it’s verbose and the real underlying argument is that it’s what they’ve grown accustomed to. `?` is no less explicit, but it is less unnecessarily verbose.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    What I can say here is that I am not one of these people who would argue in favor of Go's error handling were it 10 lines. shudders. I would definitely not use it, just like how I do not use Java for quite many reasons (unless I get paid for it, but would rather not). :P

jicea 2y ago

It's even nicer in Rust: there can be an "implicit" conversion between the error raised by foo and bar: fn foo() -> Result<(),FooError> bar()? fn bar() -> Result<(),BarError> If FooError can be created from BarError, the compiler will insert the conversion call and errors bubbles up nicely.

johnisgood 2y ago

Is it not caught by the compiler or linter though? Even variable shadowing is caught.

stouset 2y ago
Some things are. Some things aren’t. At one point, you could write nil, err without the return and it would happily compile. It’s also tragically easy for actual logic bugs to be obscured by all the boilerplate. It’s not like three lines of error handling copypasta is some optimal amount. If golang required ten lines of boilerplate error handling, you’d still have just as many people arguing in favor of it because they “like it to be explicit” when it reality it’s verbose and the real underlying argument is that it’s what they’ve grown accustomed to. `?` is no less explicit, but it is less unnecessarily verbose.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  What I can say here is that I am not one of these people who would argue in favor of Go's error handling were it 10 lines. shudders. I would definitely not use it, just like how I do not use Java for quite many reasons (unless I get paid for it, but would rather not). :P