[win311fwg]

> Reducing syntactic noise is about legibility, not writing ease.

Exactly, which said proposal does nothing to improve upon. Despite the reduction in characters it looks exactly the same as the traditional way, offering no way to improve how one think about errors. That proposal was clearly thrown out there just to try and appease the "Go doesn't have error handling" crowd without any thought into what would actually make the language better. The goal may be noble, but that particular proposal was rightfully abandoned.

> The error boilerplate as it exists interrupts the actual logic

Huh? No matter what logic you throw at the problem, there is no escaping that error handling is part of the actual logic. And it is, by far, the most important piece of the logic. Engineering is all about dealing with failure modes.

I'll grant you that there is a category of problems known as scripting tasks where error states simply can mean letting the program crash and allowing the user to clean up afterwards, but Go is clearly not trying to be a scripting language.

[ndriscoll]

I agree the ? proposal seems bad, which is why I didn't speak directly to it (but gave do notation as an example of a better solution that addresses the concern about special syntax for `error` specifically). Just the idea that explicit if err! = nil return err everywhere is somehow useful.

My experience with high level banking and low-level networking applications is that the default path for error handling is that you want to bubble up to central handlers the vast majority of the time. There's a reason why exceptions are a popular language feature; they're just hard to make work with fibres. With scripting you often don't want to handle errors at all. Just set -euo.