alt Hacker News> This clearly can't be solved "just as well" because nobody can figure out how to do it.
Fine, but then that means there is no other solution for Go unless you completely change the entire fundamental underpinnings of the language. But, again, if you're going to completely change the language, what's the point? Just use a different language that already has the semantics you seek. There are literally hundreds of them to choose from already.
> That's exactly the argument for solving this for what you're calling a "narrow" case.
Go has, and has had since day one, Java-style exception handlers. While it understandably has all the same tradeoffs as Java exception handling, if you simply need to push a value up the stack, it is there to use. Even the standard library does it when appropriate (e.g. encoding/json). The narrow error case is already covered well enough - at least as well as most other popular languages that have equally settled on Java-style exception handling.
Let me be clear: It is the general case across all types that is sucky. Errors, while revealing, are not the real problem and are merely a distraction.
I assume with "Java-style exception handlers" you're referring to panics? If this were sufficient, then people would be using it more for error handling. I'd argue that a large part of why people don't write code using them as error handling more often is because of the syntax, and that's ultimately what this whole discussion is for me. This is probably another area where we just fundamentally disagree, because I don't really consider there to be a necessity to fully solve the "real problem" instead of providing something smaller that alleviates specific minor warts.
What's strange to me is that the main reason this seems like the best path forward to me is because it doesn't require large fundamental changes to the language, and I'm skeptical that there's any fix to the underlying issues that you're concerned about that wouldn't require those sorts of changes, but somehow your objections seem to mostly be on the grounds that you also don't want those types of changes. To me, the insistence the entire real problem needs to be solved for anything to be worth doing is in practice incompatible with the requirement not to change the language fundamentally, so the question becomes whether its worth considering changes that don't fully solve what you consider to be the real issue. I think that's where the disconnect is; I'm not really trying to argue for a solution to the problem you're concerned about because I don't consider it to be realistic that it will ever get solved, so I'm arguing that making smaller changes to reduce the impact of the problem without solving it fully would be worthwhile compared only to the status quo rather than some ideal solution that I don't think exists. I'm not trying to say that it's an absolute certainty that there's no way to fix the issues you're concerned about without fundamentally changing the language, and I'd be just as happy as you if I turn out to be wrong! It doesn't really feel like you're rebutting the actual suggestion I'm making though because you're interpreting my claim that there isn't any way to solve the problem generally without changing the language fundamentally as my advocating for those fundamental changes, which is not what I actually think, and from my perspective isn't what I've been saying at all.