alt Hacker NewsJust as a devil's-advocate argument, an IDE + font could syntax-highlight + ligature `if err != nil` (only under Golang syntax mode) into a single compact heiroglyph and fade it into the background — which would in turn make anything that differs from that exact string (like `if err == nil`) now pop out, due to not being rendered that way.
The same logic could apply to the oppositions they cited to the `try` function though; an editor could easily make it stick out to alleviate it blending in when nested inside blocks. This is exactly why nobody ever accidentally confuses `.await` in Rust for a struct field even though from a plaintext perspective it's syntactically identical. If you're going to utilize the editor to carry the heavy weight, you might as well just pick literally any new syntax that replaces all of the extra typing with something more terse.