alt Hacker News... I thought Go's whole deal was that you give up the expressiveness and power of overdesigned languages for simple, clean, "only one way to do it" semantics. That "special cases reassignment" where ':=' is sometimes a shadowing declaration and sometimes a reassignment sounds like the opposite of that.
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> That "special cases reassignment" where ':=' is sometimes a shadowing declaration and sometimes a reassignment sounds like the opposite of that.
FWIW it is never a shadowing declaration. It is at least one non-shadowing declaration plus any number of reassignments.
The fun part is the tendency to keep reassigning to `err` makes the unused variable largely useless, so it’s just there to be a pain in the ass, and your need a separate lint anyway.
The language is full of gotchas like that, you're expected to use the tooling to guardrail yourself, because having a proper type system or coherent syntax is "too complicated" (while learning dozens of patterns and weird tricks apparently isn't).
go vet and this massive collection of linters bundled into a single binary are very popular: https://golangci-lint.run
linters will warn you of accidental shadowing, among many other things.