[nicoburns]

I'm not sure about that. Rust's use of a Result type instead of exceptions is one of my favourite things about Rust. Before I'd used it, I'd not realised how many reliability issues in other languages were caused by overlooked exception cases.

Exceptions are great when you don't want to handle errors properly, but when you do want robust error handling I find the "return a value" pattern much better. Notably even C++ is looking into implementing this!

[aikah]

> I'm not sure about that. Rust's use of a Result type instead of exceptions is one of my favourite things about Rust.

It works because Rust has pattern matching and generics as well. Just having a Result type isn't going to help with error handling much, and Go is not getting generics Rust style nor pattern matching any time soon.

Let us be reminded that Go errors as values are purely a convention, nothing in the language mandates their use. On the other hand panic/defer/recover are language constructs.

[threeseed]

Exactly the same with Scala.

Option types demand pattern matching and similar techniques for working with those types. Otherwise you just have "if (x.isDefined) a else b" blocks of code everywhere.

[codr4]

They are not overlooked, they are better handled further up the call stack. And not having the option to forward them implicitly is a step back, not forward. There's no way to make a programming language better by forcing users to do anything, in many cases the user will have more experience than the person implementing the language. A programming language is a tool, predicting and dictating how the tool is to be used is missing the point.

[qz_]

I don't think forcing is the right word.. I've noticed that languages where the "right way" is the path of least resistance the code quality stays high even if a lot of people with varying levels of expertise contribute

[maxscam]

Well in my experience golang Is a long ways from this anyway ... It's a very prescriptive language

[TheCoelacanth]

Forwarding errors upwards is one character in Rust (?). IMO that is pretty much the perfect balance between forwarding errors easily and explicitness.

[cle]

> There's no way to make a programming language better by forcing users to do anything

Sure there is, many important language features boil down to forcing users to do the right thing (not necessarily the easy thing).

In highly concurrent languages like Go, there’s not always a meaningful stack to unwind, and you end up having to pass error values around anyway. So I can easily sympathize with the decision to stick with one mechanism for error handling.

[jcelerier]

> many important language features boil down to forcing users to do the right thing

this just causes the users to use another language for their projects instead

[mixedCase]

And fixing the output of that is where the rest of us often profit from.

A language that provides a lot of freedom when it comes to expressiveness without offering much in the way of constraints (to truly convey the purpose of a given piece of code with the least amount of ambiguity possible) will almost definitely turn into utter crap in contact with junior developers, and will often be a source of pain for more experienced ones once the project is nontrivial, whether they realize it or not.

[codr4]

Do you see any problems with optimizing everything we do for junior developers? I mean, most of us aren't, and it would be really nice if someone gave a crap about wasting our lives as well.

[chousuke]

It's not necessary optimizing for junior developers. When properly implemented, language hand-holding is a tool for "better" programmers as well. I find that my brain capacity is limited, and the more I can focus it on issues that are productive rather than eg. tracking the liveness status of my data or potential system-wide effects messing with it, the more useful work I can perform.

Not to mention working together with more junior people, in which case it will be you doing the hand-holding instead, because the tools don't