I actually kind of like the error handling. Code should explain why something was a problem, not just where it was a problem. You get a huge string of "couldn't foobar the baz: target baz was not greebleable: no greeble provider named fizzbuzz", and while the strings are long as hell they are much better explanations for a problem than a stack trace is.

[–] msage@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hahaha, fuck no, I've dealt with exception-less code enough in my life, kthxbye

[–] GlitchSir@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I think you missed a memo. Exceptions are bad and errors as values are in… I’ll have Harold forward it to you

[–] ennemi@hexbear.net 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The language was designed to be as simple as possible, as to not confuse the developers at Google. I know this sounds like something I made up in bad faith, but it's really not.

The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike

"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical. – Rob Pike

The infamous if err != nil blocks are a consequence of building the language around tuples (as opposed to, say, sum types like in Rust) and treating errors as values like in C. Rob Pike attempts to explain why it's not a big deal here.

[–] silent_water@hexbear.net 6 points 1 year ago

a desperate fear of modular code that provides sound and safe abstractions over common patterns. that the language failed to learn from Java and was eventually forced to add generics anyway - a lesson from 2004 - says everything worth saying about the language.