[awused]

I recommend you read your own posts sometimes. Your claim of "in Go values must always be useful" was rebutted multiple times. That you're trying to move the goalposts to something neither of us was arguing speaks loudly. You also dance dishonestly around the actual point I made in that last post. Again, I'd recommend following your advice about reading a thread before responding to it.

[randomdata]

> Your claim of "in Go values must always be useful"

I said no such thing. I said idiomatic Go indicates that you must always make values useful. This is an onus placed on the programmer, not something guaranteed by the language. However, since the Either monad here was said to be introduced to wrap idiomatic Go code, not whatever haphazardly written Go code you happened to find in a SourceForge repository, that is of relevance.

> was rebutted multiple times

Cool. I must not have read it. There was a lot of weird shit in there that had nothing to do with anything. I'm not sure how that would even find relevance to the discussion taking place. I get that first year computer science programs are starting up and you're excited to share what you learned in your first week, but I really don't care. You are not going to tell me anything I haven't heard many times before.

[awused]

>whatever haphazardly written Go code you happened to find

Well, if the Go stdlib is haphazardly written and unidiomatic then I think the burden is on you to demonstrate that idiomatic Go, as per your definition, exists.

>more baseless ad-hominem and ignoring the points

I'll boil it down to one sentence: Go forces programmers to use (T, error) when it is not appropriate, and Go would be better if it did not.

[randomdata]

> Well, if the Go stdlib is haphazardly written and unidiomatic

Yeah, the older parts of the standard library are definitely not idiomatic. Lots of functions in the stdlib which return errors don't even return an error type. But, of course they aren't idiomatic. Idiomatacy is emergent. They couldn't possibly have been written idiomatically.

> I'll boil it down to one sentence: Go forces programmers to use (T, error) when it is not appropriate, and Go would be better if it did not.

That may be true, but of no relevance. I can see why I didn't bother reading it. Thanks for clarifying that it would have been a waste of my time.

[awused]

So you've defined idiomatic Go code in your own way, that no one else's definitions match with, such that no idiomatic Go code actually exists. If no idiomatic Go code exists, then it's definitionally true that all idiomatic Go code is without flaws, but I don't agree with your personalized definition of idiomatic Go in the first place.

>That may be true, but of no relevance.

So you agree with this, and it rebuts the entire contents of the first post I responded to. I wonder why you were posting irrelevant, off-topic content yourself. But I'm glad you finally agree that Go isn't flawless.

[randomdata]

> I don't agree with your personalized definition of idiomatic Go in the first place.

"That's the point. They are not equivalent, they represent different things" – Oh snap. Well, so much for that silly tangent.

If you want to actually have a discussion, you are going to have to go and understand the discussion that was taking place before you tried to take it in some weird and nonsensical direction. The non-sequitors may be entertaining, maybe even true, but off in la-la land with respect to the conversation taking place.

If your intent is simply to be my personal jester, then by all means, run with it. I'll continue to enjoy the laughs. Most people would pay good money to see an entertainer of this caliber, and you are offering it to me for free! I feel privileged.

[awused]

Since you seem unwilling or unable to follow an argument you started this seems more like an attempt to bait a response that you can report to the mods instead of an honest conversation. If you want to know why the alleged tangent was relevant, well, the posts are still there.

[Huggernaut]

Just in support of your position, the Google Style Guide says the following:

> If a function returns an error, callers must treat all non-error return values as unspecified unless explicitly documented otherwise

It is absolutely not idiomatic to give any meaning to non-error values under error conditions in the usual case. That is extremely unusual and would be generally confusing.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/go/decisions#returning-e...

[randomdata]

> It is absolutely not idiomatic to give any meaning to non-error values under error conditions in the usual case.

Based on what? We have come to see that it is beneficial to make zero values useful. In fact, Go Proverbs even says so. Likewise, we have learned it is useful to return the zero value when you have an error. Most commonly, this means returning nil, which is packed full of all kinds of useful information. Therefore, the T value can be expected to useful if the code is idiomatic.

I'd love to see some real-world code you think is idiomatic, but doesn't return a useful T value when there is an error.

> If a function returns an error, callers must treat all non-error return values as unspecified unless explicitly documented otherwise

This is not at odds with that. This merely warns that not all code you may call will be idiomatic. In fact, if I recall correctly, doesn't os.Open (maybe os.Create) return an invalid file handle in some error cases? The standard library is old and what helped us eventually see what is idiomatic. It is decidedly not idiomatic for the most part. If you rely on a function being written idiomatically, then you are going to run into trouble, as that is not a guarantee (unless the documentation provides such a guarantee).

But in the case of this Either wrapper, it explicitly states it is for use with idiomatic code, not any old code you can throw at it.