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Just to add my two cents—I’ve been writing Go professionally for about 10 years, and neither I nor any of my colleagues have had real issues with how Go handles

Just to add my two cents—I’ve been writing Go professionally for about 10 years, and neither I nor any of my colleagues have had real issues with how Go handles errors. Newcomers often push back on this aspect of the language (among other things), but in my experience, that usually fades as they get more familiar with Go’s philosophy and design choices. As for the Go team’s decision process, I think it’s a good thing that the lack of consensus over a long period and many attempts can prompt them to formally define a position.

ummonk 1y ago
Yeah once you've been using it long enough for the Stockholm syndrome to set in, you come to terms with the hostile parts of the language.
- janderland 1y ago
  I suspect a lot of us don’t have strong feelings either way and don’t find the verbosity “hostile”. No need for Stockholm syndrome if you don’t feel like a prisoner. Of course you may have been joking, in which case “haha”. xD
- Mawr 1y ago
  If you say so. For me it's always been the opposite - I'm excited at the start about all the cool features, then slowly get disillusioned because of the warts.
dangoodmanUT 1y ago
This, it’s always the new people complaining about error handling. I have many things to complain about for other languages that I’m sure are top-tier complaints too
- tines 1y ago
  I appreciate the argument that things can often be difficult for noobs but actually fine or better than alternatives once you get used to them. But on the other hand, people who are "used to the way things are" are often the worst people to evaluate whether changes are beneficial. It seems like the new people are the ones that should be listened to most carefully. I'm not saying the Go team was wrong in this decision, just that your heuristic isn't necessarily a good one.
  - jchw 1y ago
    This logic mostly only makes sense if your goal is primarily to grow the audience and widen the appeal, though. I think at this stage in the Go programming language's lifespan, that is no longer the goal. If anything, Go has probably started to saturate its own sweet spot in some ways and a lot of complaints reveal a difference in values more than they do opportunity for improvement. To me, it makes sense for the Go team to focus on improving Go for the vast majority of its users over the opinions of people who don't like it that much in the first place. There's millions of lines of code written in Go and those are going to have to be maintained for many years. Of utmost priority in my mind is making Go code more correct (i.e. By adding tools that can make code more correct-by-construction or eliminate classes of errors. I didn't say concurrency safety, but... some form of correctness checking for code involving mutexes would be really nice, something like gVisor checklocks but better.) And on that note, if I could pick something to prioritize to add to Go, it would probably be sum types with pattern matching. I don't think it is extremely likely that we will see those, since it's a massive language change that isn't exactly easy to reconcile with what's already here. (e.g. a `Result` type would naturally emerge from the existence of sum types. Maybe that's an improvement, but boy that is a non-trivial change.)
- jiehong 1y ago
  It’s fun, because when a newcomer joins a team, people tend to remind them that their bison is fresh and they might be seeing pain we got accustomed to. That’s usually said in a positive manner.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    I'm intrigued as to whether "bison" here is a metaphor (for what?) or a cupertino (an error introduced by auto-correct or predictive text)
    - jiehong 1y ago
      bison -> vision/point of view. Bad auto-correct, my bad
abtinf 1y ago
I have a similar level of experience with Go, and I would go so far as to say it is in fact one of the best features of the language. I wouldn’t be surprised that when the pro-exception-handling crowd eventually wins, it will lead to hard forks and severe fragmentation of the entire ecosystem.
- jchw 1y ago
  To be honest, I really don't believe that will happen in the future. All of the proposals pretty much just add syntactical sugar, and even those have failed to gain consensus.
zarzavat 1y ago
That's just survivorship bias isn't it? The newcomers who find Go's design and/or leadership obnoxious get a job that doesn't involve doing something that they dislike.
- arp242 1y ago
  That's okay. Not everyone needs to like Go. Pleasing every programmer on the planet is an unreasonable thing to ask for. It's also impossible because some preferences conflict.
  - zarzavat 1y ago
    After over a decade of people bringing up the issue in almost every single thread about Go, it's time to give the language what it deserves: no more constructive feedback, snarky dismissals only.
    - arp242 1y ago
      Not infrequently by people who are not even Go programmers. And/or the same people who hijack every other Go thread to rant about how much they hate Go. In a quick search, you seem to be one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41136266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41136266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40855396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40855396 You don't see me going around $languages_I_dislike threads slagging off the language, much less demanding features. Not saying anything is an option you know.
deleted 1y ago
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ummonk 1y ago

Yeah once you've been using it long enough for the Stockholm syndrome to set in, you come to terms with the hostile parts of the language.

janderland 1y ago
I suspect a lot of us don’t have strong feelings either way and don’t find the verbosity “hostile”. No need for Stockholm syndrome if you don’t feel like a prisoner. Of course you may have been joking, in which case “haha”. xD
Mawr 1y ago
If you say so. For me it's always been the opposite - I'm excited at the start about all the cool features, then slowly get disillusioned because of the warts.

dangoodmanUT 1y ago

This, it’s always the new people complaining about error handling. I have many things to complain about for other languages that I’m sure are top-tier complaints too

tines 1y ago
I appreciate the argument that things can often be difficult for noobs but actually fine or better than alternatives once you get used to them. But on the other hand, people who are "used to the way things are" are often the worst people to evaluate whether changes are beneficial. It seems like the new people are the ones that should be listened to most carefully. I'm not saying the Go team was wrong in this decision, just that your heuristic isn't necessarily a good one.
- jchw 1y ago
  This logic mostly only makes sense if your goal is primarily to grow the audience and widen the appeal, though. I think at this stage in the Go programming language's lifespan, that is no longer the goal. If anything, Go has probably started to saturate its own sweet spot in some ways and a lot of complaints reveal a difference in values more than they do opportunity for improvement. To me, it makes sense for the Go team to focus on improving Go for the vast majority of its users over the opinions of people who don't like it that much in the first place. There's millions of lines of code written in Go and those are going to have to be maintained for many years. Of utmost priority in my mind is making Go code more correct (i.e. By adding tools that can make code more correct-by-construction or eliminate classes of errors. I didn't say concurrency safety, but... some form of correctness checking for code involving mutexes would be really nice, something like gVisor checklocks but better.) And on that note, if I could pick something to prioritize to add to Go, it would probably be sum types with pattern matching. I don't think it is extremely likely that we will see those, since it's a massive language change that isn't exactly easy to reconcile with what's already here. (e.g. a `Result` type would naturally emerge from the existence of sum types. Maybe that's an improvement, but boy that is a non-trivial change.)
jiehong 1y ago
It’s fun, because when a newcomer joins a team, people tend to remind them that their bison is fresh and they might be seeing pain we got accustomed to. That’s usually said in a positive manner.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  I'm intrigued as to whether "bison" here is a metaphor (for what?) or a cupertino (an error introduced by auto-correct or predictive text)
  - jiehong 1y ago
    bison -> vision/point of view. Bad auto-correct, my bad

abtinf 1y ago

I have a similar level of experience with Go, and I would go so far as to say it is in fact one of the best features of the language. I wouldn’t be surprised that when the pro-exception-handling crowd eventually wins, it will lead to hard forks and severe fragmentation of the entire ecosystem.

jchw 1y ago
To be honest, I really don't believe that will happen in the future. All of the proposals pretty much just add syntactical sugar, and even those have failed to gain consensus.

zarzavat 1y ago

That's just survivorship bias isn't it? The newcomers who find Go's design and/or leadership obnoxious get a job that doesn't involve doing something that they dislike.

arp242 1y ago
That's okay. Not everyone needs to like Go. Pleasing every programmer on the planet is an unreasonable thing to ask for. It's also impossible because some preferences conflict.
- zarzavat 1y ago
  After over a decade of people bringing up the issue in almost every single thread about Go, it's time to give the language what it deserves: no more constructive feedback, snarky dismissals only.
  - arp242 1y ago
    Not infrequently by people who are not even Go programmers. And/or the same people who hijack every other Go thread to rant about how much they hate Go. In a quick search, you seem to be one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41136266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41136266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40855396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40855396 You don't see me going around $languages_I_dislike threads slagging off the language, much less demanding features. Not saying anything is an option you know.

deleted 1y ago

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