I personally welcome this decision. I am fairly happy with the current syntax and I enjoy the explicit “does what it says” nature of Go code. None of the proposed alternatives would have made error handling more robust, they were pure syntactic sugar with no nutritional value.
Saying no to multiple proposals when you feel that the status quo is better can be difficult to do and I am happy that the Go team is able to make these kinds of decisions.
I liked the thorough explanation of the decision process, but I think universal approval is a paralysing requirement. This risks stagnation.
Especially when compared to generics. They spent so much time on that, and for what? They say themselves that most users are unlikely to use or encounter it. Personally, I’ve found Go generics to be useless in most of the cases they’d be handy, because of the limitation about methods being required to match struct specifiers. Everywhere else I’ve used them, I could have easily worked around them and probably come out with more clear code.
Error syntax jockied with generics for first place user concern for years, and they chose to roll out the change that would have a lesser impact on user convenience and code readability.
Bitter Ruaidhrigh is bitter.
after much deliberation, we’ve decided to do absolutely nothing
lol, lmao even
Which is completely reasonable. Insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes.
It’s not like they tried nothing and are all out of ideas; they tried a lot and nothing stuck so far.
I see it as a pretty clear sign of dysfunction in the project unfortunately. Being unable to reach an actionable decision to improve on the most disliked part of the language (I’m personally ambivalent, I find that the repetitive error handling quickly fades into the background, but I also really love the ? operator in rust) is a bad sign.
