Comment by b7e7d855b448

> Because having any language facilities for error handling is harmful.

No, making error handling verbose mandatory is meant to make developers do mental cardio and be mindful of what they are doing.

You can either keep developers mindful or punish them after they make a mistake by shouting at them and make them waste their time during re-compiling.

P.S.: Yes, I love Go's error handling mechanics, which makes handling errors mandatory, not optional, and if you ignore the error, this is a deliberate choice and the burden is on the developer. Go does the former, Rust does the latter.

This comment could make the same point and be even more effective if wasn't written as a snarky retort in violation of several of the guidelines of the site ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )

I don't say it's perfect, but right in this moment I feel most comfortable with go and I don't mind jumping through a few hoops or writing things multiple times

https://pkg.go.dev/slices#Contains ?

Also, if error wrapping hurts you so much (I don't use it), just implement a project-specific error that works how you want. This could be something that is JSON serializable, that captures a line number at each return site, etc. It will take like 10 minutes to get your project's errors working exactly how you want.

My projects usually do -

    log.SetFlags(log.LstdFlags | log.Lshortfile)
    // ...
    if err != nil {
        log.Println(err)
        return errors.New("Error doing the thing.")
    }

That essentially logs a stack trace with line numbers up the whole error chain, each return adding the outer context. I only ever use errors.Is for os.ErrNotExist.

1. There is nothing stopping you from implementing a Contains function.

2.That error handling is one of the best features. It makes me explicitly acknowledge the errors instead of letting them just happen. No error goes unnoticed!

Each if err != nil is an explicit reminder to check, do I need to clean up? Do I need to log this error to a file?

"And no more oh an error happened I wonder where"

With LLMs verbosity is not an excuse anymore. Just generate it and focus on other things then

You forgot to put /s after your post.

Your handwritten one has a major performance bug:

    found := false
    for _, v := range s {
        if v == needle {
            found = true
            break
        }
    }

Do you see it? It copies the v into a local variable, which could be tremendously wasteful if it's a large struct. You should instead be taking a pointer to s[i] and comparing the value there with `needle`.

If you'd used `slices.Contains(s, needle)`, on the other hand, it could have such a performance bug in it and you'd never know.

I think the examples are both bad along different axis. One occupies more lines, the other results in _more_ and uglier syntax. They’re both bad. So the question is which axis is worse.

While the first occupies more lines I suspect I’d spend less time spotting it in the code. The physical shape of the expression is something my brain is used to seeing after 40 years of programming. Even when code grows more complex.

The second is OK when it stands alone, but I am not so certain it would be as easy to spot in more complex surroundings. Even on a single line, there is something a bit ugly about the code. Even before we get to the desperate triple-pipe. That kind of reminds me of the desperate attempts at repairing JS after they realized its equality semantics were shot. Just heap more characters on it.

The thing is: it is actually very hard to judge how ergonomic a language is by just looking at it. You have to use it and you have to use it enough to realize where the paint points really are. I’ve read through a lot of the responses in this discussion and I’ll be honest: I think a lot of people who criticize other languages (be they Rust, C, Go or whatever) aren’t very fluent in them. It takes a couple of years to develop fluency.

There are so many proposals for improving errors, even half implemented ones that are dropped. I even stopped checking pros and cons after a few. As ultimately everything got rejected and the message is that you have to live with verbose checking with llms now.

Have you tried to read the Kubernetes or Docker codebases?

If you are prototyping, assign unused to the underscore.

foo := thinger()

_ = foo # no longer unused

The greatest thing about generics is … that they're not used much if at all.

Which is a great way to make sure they're not overused, which in my experience is better than underuse.

Also not adding every single feature that could be nice is a good thing to me. Yes, there is a lot of syntactic sugar you could add, but this just ends up in even more debates and in the end it doesn't matter that much. There is a very clear path how to achieve regular things in go and that works fine for now