[pixl97]

No this is an example of survivorship bias.

Let's say Go has such bad error handling that it becomes the number one reason people don't use it.

The people left that do use it will be the ones that don't care about error handling. Hence you're asking the people that don't care versus 90% of the audience you've already lost.

[throwaway894345]

I don’t think you understood my comment. My argument was not “we should only care about Go users”, it was that we should not prioritize the opinions of people who may not even become users even if error handling is changed over the opinions of people who are very likely to use Go or those who already do.

Specifically, if Go’s error handling poses a constitutional objection for you, it’s probably just one item in a long list of things that prevent you from using the language. Changing everything to pacify you will take a long time and likely involve many breaking changes, and the end result is likely to be something that does not appeal to Go’s users or even many of the people who shared your objection about error handling but not all of your other objections.

This is not survivorship bias.