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by airless_bar 3669 days ago
Not really.

The main strength of the first approach is that Option is only one type out of many error-handling structures.

Not every error is handled appropriately by Option/?.

If you have a language like Kotlin where they hard-coded one way of handling errors, it feels very unidiomatic to pick a better fitting error handling type, while in languages where errors are handled by library code, it's a very natural approach.
1 comments
kmiroslav 3669 days ago
> Not every error is handled appropriately by Option/?.

Which is expected since these two constructs are not aimed at handling errors: they manage missing values.

> If you have a language like Kotlin where they hard-coded one way of handling errors

No, no. `?` is not for handling errors.

Kotlin is as agnostic as Scala for managing errors: you are free to use exceptions, dumb return values or smarter ones (`Either`, `\/`, `Try`, ...).

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airless_bar 3669 days ago
Yeah, it's just that-if you look at every language ever designed-if the language ships with a built-in construct developers will use and abuse it on every occasion, and every other approach lingers in obscurity.

> Which is expected since these two constructs are not aimed at handling errors: they manage missing values.

Which is a very small part of handling errors in general. As Kotlin offers special syntax for only this case, developers tend to shoehorn many errors into the "missing-value" design to get the "nice" syntax even if a different approach would have been more appropriate.

> Kotlin is as agnostic as Scala for managing errors: you are free to use exceptions, dumb return values or smarter ones (`Either`, `\/`, `Try`, ...).

That's not true in practice:

Just have a look at funktionale: Despite providing almost the same as Scala's error handling types (partially due to the blatant copyright violations) almost nobody uses it. This is a direct result from having a "first-class" construct in the language: It turns library-based designs into second-class citizens.

That's the thing Scala got right, and many of the copy-cat languages got wrong.

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kmiroslav 3669 days ago
> Which is a very small part of handling errors in general

Missing values are not errors.

If you look up a key on a map and that key is not present, it's not an error.

> partially due to the blatant copyright violations

Uh copyright what? On an API?!?

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airless_bar 3669 days ago
> Missing values are not errors.

Call it whatever you want. ? only covers a small subset of interesting "conditions" while tremendously hurting "conditions" which could be handled in a better way.

> Uh copyright what? On an API?!?

Implementation. The copying of slightly buggy exceptions strings makes it even more obvious that files were copied verbatim with just enough syntax changes to turn Scala code into Kotlin code while replacing the original license and authors with different ones.

PS: Feel free to comment on actual the points I made.

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kmiroslav 3668 days ago
> PS: Feel free to comment on actual the points I made.

Sure.

I think the idea that API's (or implementations as you said) can be copyrighted is completely insane and I can't believe any software engineer would be okay with it. Which makes me think you're not a software engineer, and that's okay, but please read up on the issues, this is super important for our profession.

I can't belive the US made that a law and it makes me sure that I will never want to move there.

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airless_bar 3668 days ago
> I think the idea that API's (or implementations as you said) can be copyrighted is completely insane and I can't believe any software engineer would be okay with it. Which makes me think you're not a software engineer, and that's okay, but please read up on the issues, this is super important for our profession.

I think you are super confused here. This is not about APIs. Copyright is what allows software developers to enforce a license of their choice. Without copyright, the license is just a text file without meaning. I suggest you read up on the FSF's position on this if you want to have an example.

> Sure.

(Still waiting for you to comment on the points I have made.)

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