alt Hacker NewsThis issue contradicts the cited surveys where error handling is identified as the most important issue. Isn't the survey more reliable way to read the community room than a github issue?
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Merovius • last Thursday at 10:01 PM
Oh and to be clear: I didn't say "look at this issue, most people clearly prefer the status quo". I just said that given this issue, making the claim that the status quo is objectively bad is hard to justify. I said that its badness is clearly subjective.
That is, I criticized the strength of the original claim. I didn't try to make an equally strong opposite claim.
It doesn't really contradict the survey all that much. 13% of respondents said that error handling is the biggest issue. That leaves 87%, which can rank anywhere from "it's an issue, but not the biggest" through "it's a minor nuisance" through "I don't care" up to "I actively like the status quo". We can only guess about the distribution.
And yes, I agree that the survey is a better source of data, generally. But I will also say that it intentionally asks as broad a definition of "Go user" as possible. Meaning it also (intentionally) asks people who might use Go every once in a while at work. And a good chunk of respondents are newcomers. These groups are more likely to identify this as a problem. While people who are active on GitHub tend to bias towards people who use it as a daily driver and are much more used to its idioms.
The data is mixed. I fully acknowledge that. But anecdotally, there seems to be a pretty clear pattern that people who come new to the language complain about this, but then get used to it and at the point where they become active in the community, they prefer the status quo. I don't think the experience of newcomers should be dismissed, but I also think it should be acknowledged that it's something most people get used to.