[dallbee]

Like with all languages the implementer matters. There's a remarkable amount of variance that I've encountered in the tersiness of both Go and Java code.

For example, Go's err != nil pattern is often cited as being ugly, but good go code will often remove errors by design.

There's a good post by Dave Cheney about this; https://dave.cheney.net/2019/01/27/eliminate-error-handling-....

I think this is equally true of Java. Most Java code I've seen disgusts me, but I've also seen some beautifully written pieces.

[_0w8t]

This pattern is known in numerical computing as NaN. It’s drawback is that when the computation produces NaN, one has no idea what triggered it. But that can be mitigated if the program prints stack trace on the first NaN. In case of Go that corresponds to logging error when it happens.

Another thing is that in many cases there is no good sentinel value to return that naturally leads to exit from loops or complex logic to check for error at the end of a function.