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by cmccabe
4617 days ago
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It seems like you missed a lot of the other things he said, such as "testing is built into the language," and "binaries are statically compiled and will work on any reasonable kernel." These may not be sexy features, but they are features that you need to actually make reliable programs. And frankly, yes, Go's approach to handling errors is a Big Deal. It's counter to the tendency of the last few years to move more and more error handling into exceptions. In retrospect, we can see that that was a mistake, similar to the "natural language programming" dead-end that led to COBOL and HyperCard. Challenging the exception-handling orthodoxy is absolutely something interesting and new. What makes Go so special other than the lack of deep class hierarchies?
This is an "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" type of comment. Go's type system is absolutely huge in terms of making it special. It would never have attracted the attention it did if it were just another Modula-3 rehash like Java, C++, D, etc. |
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It's not.
> It's counter to the tendency of the last few years to move more and more error handling into exceptions.
Haskell says hi. Go's error handling is a step back not because it tries to avoid exceptions but because it's a crummy very slight improvement over C error handling. Contrary to what you believe, the world has moved on since then, even outside of exceptions-based error handling.
> Challenging the exception-handling orthodoxy is absolutely something interesting and new.
It absolutely is not new, and there is nothing interesting to the way Go did it (which is a significant downgrade of Erlang's way of handling errors)
> Go's type system is absolutely huge in terms of making it special.
You have not answered the question.
> It would never have attracted the attention it did
Of course it would, the attention it attracted is due to its backers, not to its intrinsic qualities (of which it has few, lost in a morass of decisions which would have been bad 30 years ago).