alt Hacker NewsFrom the Elixir's developer perspective, this is insane. The issue is solved in Erlang / Elixir by functions commonly returning {:ok, result} or {:error, description_or_struct} tuples. This, together with Elixir's `with` statement allows to group error handling at the bottom, which makes for much nicer readability.
Go could just add an equivalent of `with` clause, which would basically continue with functions as long as error is nil and have an error handling clause at the bottom.
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Go's multiple return is in itself insane from my perspective. You cannot 'do' anything with a function that has multiple return types except assign them to a variable.
Haskellers and Rust fans think they own sum types, and people read their comments and blog posts and believe them, and decide they don't want sum types because they don't want to go down the horrifying Hindley-Milner rabbit hole.
But meanwhile it's just perfectly idiomatic Erlang and Elixir, none of that baggage required. (In fact, the sum types are vastly more powerful than in the ML lineage - they're open.)
From all available evidence, there is no chance in hell Go could adopt a `with` statement.
Go is fascinating in how long it holds out on some of the most basic, obviously valuable constructs (generics, error handling, package management) because The Community cannot agree.
- Generics took 13 years from the open source release.
- 16 years in there isn’t error handling.
- Package management took about 9 years.
There’s value to deliberation and there’s value to shipping. My guess is that the people writing 900 GH comments would still write Go and be better off by the language having something vs. kicking the can down the road.