I have invented a remarkable new programming tool that wires up to your chair, keyboard, and 110v AC. It gives you an electric shock every time you complete a line of code, reminding you to stop and think about it. Think of the productivity!
Checked exceptions are indeed obnoxious and a major language design failure, which is why pretty much every modern language since just has plain old (non-checked) exceptions. And even in Java, you can work around the brain damage by wrapping checked exceptions with runtime equivalents in API facades. Exceptions are still incredibly useful, and lack thereof is my biggest complaint about Go.
I'm also disappointed by the convention of capitalizing/lowercasing names to export them or not. Realize that you want to export an existing private method? What's that, your IDE doesn't support refactoring? Get typing, you have a lot of method calls to update.
> I'm also disappointed by the convention of capitalizing/lowercasing names to export them or not.
I think it's fine, personally. It's not overly obnoxious, it gives shape to the code, it avoids the redundancy of an explicit export list (although that also means it's harder to see at a glance what's exported from a module I guess) and it makes sense within Go's habit of mandating formatting, there's no reason not to leverage this mandate.
Exceptions make it harder to reason about your code's execution path. If you raise an exception, it is often not obvious who in the call stack is ultimately going to catch and handle it. The logic for that can live pretty much anywhere. This is not to mention the try/catch/finally pyramids you get from trying to cope with nested failure cases.
Go uses a well-understood mechanism: return. Control reverts to the caller. It's simple, which was an explicit design goal of Go.
IMHO, if you have a choice between exceptions or not, they just aren't worth the value they deliver. As Josh Bloch says, use them for exceptional circumstances only, to indicate truly exceptional circumstances, such as catastrophic errors.
In practice, is this really a huge deal? Modulo go fmt, what editor doesn't support multi-file S&R with regex? Isn't this what a compiler is for? All in all, this sounds like bikeshedding about syntax. We're all entitled to our opinions but it's awfully hard to say anything interesting about syntax which has not already been said a bajillion times.
Comments
I have invented a remarkable new programming tool that wires up to your chair, keyboard, and 110v AC. It gives you an electric shock every time you complete a line of code, reminding you to stop and think about it. Think of the productivity!
Checked exceptions are indeed obnoxious and a major language design failure, which is why pretty much every modern language since just has plain old (non-checked) exceptions. And even in Java, you can work around the brain damage by wrapping checked exceptions with runtime equivalents in API facades. Exceptions are still incredibly useful, and lack thereof is my biggest complaint about Go.
I'm also disappointed by the convention of capitalizing/lowercasing names to export them or not. Realize that you want to export an existing private method? What's that, your IDE doesn't support refactoring? Get typing, you have a lot of method calls to update.
> I'm also disappointed by the convention of capitalizing/lowercasing names to export them or not.
I think it's fine, personally. It's not overly obnoxious, it gives shape to the code, it avoids the redundancy of an explicit export list (although that also means it's harder to see at a glance what's exported from a module I guess) and it makes sense within Go's habit of mandating formatting, there's no reason not to leverage this mandate.
Coding conventions on steroids, if you will.
Exceptions make it harder to reason about your code's execution path. If you raise an exception, it is often not obvious who in the call stack is ultimately going to catch and handle it. The logic for that can live pretty much anywhere. This is not to mention the try/catch/finally pyramids you get from trying to cope with nested failure cases.
Go uses a well-understood mechanism: return. Control reverts to the caller. It's simple, which was an explicit design goal of Go.
IMHO, if you have a choice between exceptions or not, they just aren't worth the value they deliver. As Josh Bloch says, use them for exceptional circumstances only, to indicate truly exceptional circumstances, such as catastrophic errors.
Re: refactoring: http://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/. Check out the -r option.
In practice, is this really a huge deal? Modulo go fmt, what editor doesn't support multi-file S&R with regex? Isn't this what a compiler is for? All in all, this sounds like bikeshedding about syntax. We're all entitled to our opinions but it's awfully hard to say anything interesting about syntax which has not already been said a bajillion times.
"It gives you an electric shock every time you complete a line of code"
Is that on kickstarter? Put me down for 10!