>OpenAI and its partner Microsoft investigated accounts believed to be DeepSeek’s last year that were using OpenAI’s application programming interface (API) and blocked their access on suspicion of distillation that violated the terms of service, another person with direct knowledge said. These investigations were first reported by Bloomberg.

When you take both of these points and put them back to back, a natural answer seems to suggest itself which I'm not sure the authors intended to imply: R1 attempted to use o1 to make its answers seem more human, and as a result it accidentally picked up most of it's reasoning capabilities in the process. Is my reading totally off?

I don't really understand why the stock market has decided this affects nvidia's stock price though.

The reality of AI, if AI succeeds in replacing programmers (and there's reason to be skeptical of that) is that it will simply be a "move up the value chain". Former programmers instead of developing highly technical skills will have new skills - either helping to make models that meet new goals or guiding those models to produce things that meet requirements. It will not mean all programmers are automatically unemployable - but we will need to change.

I mean, education will have to change. In the early years of computer science, the focus was on building entire systems from scratch. Now programming is mainly about developing glue between different libraries to suit are particular use case. This means that we need to understand far less about the theoretical underpinnings of computing (hence all the griping about why programmers don't need to write their own sorting algorithms, so why does every interview ask it).

It's not gone as a skill, it's just different.

>For humans to flourish, does it mean simply “do as little as possible”? Once you automated everything, where would one find meaningful activity that makes one feel needed by other humans?

So I had a eureka moment with AI programming a few weeks ago. In it, I described a basic domain problem in clear english language. It was revealing not just because of all the time it saved, but because it fundamentally changed how programming worked for me. I was, instead of writing code and developing my domain, I was able to focus my mind completely on one single problem. Now my experiences with AI programming have been much worse since then, but I think it highlights how AI has the potential to remove drudgery from our work - tasks that are easy to automate, are almost by definition, rote. I instead get to focus on the more fun parts. The fulfilling parts.

>By definition automation is about scaling and the higher up the chain you go the fewer people are needed to manage the bots; what do you do with the rest? (Do you believe the people who run the models for profit and benefit the most would volunteer to redistribute their wealth and enact some sort of post-scarcity commmunist-like equality?)

I think the best precedent here is the start of the 20th century. In this period, elites were absolutely entrenched against the idea of things like increasing worker pay or granting their workers more rights or raising taxes. However, I believe one of the major turning points in this struggle worldwide was the revolution in Russia. Not because of the communist ideals it epoused, but because of the violence and chaos it caused. People, including economic elites, aren't marxist-style unthinking bots - they could tell that if they didn't do something about the desperation and poverty they had created, they would be next. So due to a combination of self interest, and yes, their own moral compasses, they made compromises with the radicals to improve the standard of living for the poor and common workers, who were mostly happy to accept those compromises.

Now, it's MUCH more complicated than I've laid out here. The shift away from the gilded age had been happening for nearly twenty years at that point. But I think it illustrates that concentrating economic power that doesn't trickle down is dangerous - creating constant social destruction with no reward will destroy themselves. And they will be smart enough to realize this.

I like to think that the best kind of automation when it comes to writing code is writing less code, but instead writing it with strategic abstractions embodying your best understanding of subject matter and architectural vision.

- Support for nullable values. Swift and Kotlin have first class support for these, which are meant to minimize or reduce the number of null pointers in your code. You can mostly fix this with annotations, but those your team using them very consistently, and are not supported by most java libraries.

- It's approach to concurrency. Java built in synchronization primitive is based upon an older model of concurrency whose name I cant remember but it involves every object basically being able to maintain internal consistency with it's own state. No one still uses it like this, with most method creating an `Object lock` as a synchronization primitive.

- Serialization. Java has built in binary serialization support that ended up being a massive security hole. Most people are now forced to use some json serialization, but the old serialization format is still lurking in the background to ensnare less knowledgeable programmers.

- Generics. Smarter people than me can probably give you more detail on this, but generics were grafted on to the language long after it was introduced, and it shows. At runtime, there are no generic types kept, meaning it is technically possible to break the generic typing of an object.

None of these it should be noted are deal breakers or reasons why you shouldn't use the language. Almost every single one has some form of workaround for it. But if you're not aware of them (or stuck with an older legacy codebase like a lot of people are) they can be major headaches that can just be avoided by using a more modern language.

Another issue I have is the reliance on reflection. In general, I think if you have to rely on reflection to do something, that usually means you're working around some inherent limitation in the normal language - and the resulting code is often far less readable than the code would be in a more expressive language. Lots of Go libraries and frameworks are forced to use it in a lot of cases because there's just no other way to express some really basic things without it.

I really want to like Go. There's a lot I like - the "only one way to do something" approach means that code always feels consistent. Errors as values is a far superior approach to exceptions. I had to write some for a job interview project a while back and it felt really refreshing, but every time I try to use it for a personal project, I don't feel like I'm getting anything out of it that I couldn't get out of say, Rust, or modern, typed Python.

I don't mean this as slight against those people that really enjoy writing lots of (Go) code. It’s just my observation after being in a few different contexts where Go was the language of choice. Personally Go is too verbose for me and this is especially painful/apparent when you get to writing the multitude of tests required to ensure your code works since Go’s type system/compiler doesn't lend you much in the way of helping ensure code correctness.

Go is essentially the new Java.

>It’s just my observation

Well, my observation after dealing with js and ruby projects (ruby was my main language a few years ago) - those creating and expressive languages lead to fewer lines, sure, but in the end you are dealing with a pile of crap nobody want's to touch because some of the developers were so creative and wanted to express themselves more than they wanted to solve the problem.

Go is a tool if you actually want to solve the problem and make sure people after can quickly understand how and why you solved it. Rather than stand in awe of your creation.

I disagree with that.

The problem in those cases is not expressivity. It's complex features that are very easy to misuse and have no alternatives within the language.

And Go is littered with those. It allows for lots of "cleverness" around Reflection and Empty Interfaces, which effectively turn it into a poorly-specified ad-hoc dynamic language. Same for templates. This is the same problem of Meta-programming in Ruby, and the same problem with complex OOP architecture that plagues some Java projects. It's all avoidable, of course.

Those features are not "expressive", quite the contrary, but they lead to the same problem of "pile of crap nobody want's to touch because some of the developers were so creative and wanted to express themselves".

It takes as much discipline within a team to avoid this in Golang (or any other "non-expressive language") than in more expressive languages.

On the other hand, lots of new ES6 features give it more expressivity without necessarily adding complexity and in fact making the code easier to read and more reliable.

I strongly disagree with that. You can do it, you can do clever code through reflection. But it is actively discouraged unless it's something required to solve the problem, e.g automatic JSON marshalling/unmarshalling.

No professional Go dev is going to immediately reach for empty interfaces or reflection without seeing what the solution looks like with verbose type safe code.

Also, overuse of reflection doesn't happen overnight, or only because of inexperienced programmers.

In most complex projects it happens because someone wants to add more complex abstractions that exist in other languages to help with the work and to reduce programmer error and the only way to do it is via Reflection and Empty Interfaces, or maybe via templates.

In Go, empty interfaces and reflection, or templates, are for some cases the only possible way to solve a large class of complex problems. If you don't encounter those problems then it's all good, but some people do.

You haven't also taken into account the possibility of people having to maintain pieces of Go code acquired or forked from somewhere else. Maybe my team was the one who inherited the code from someone who "perpetrated some empty interface crimes".

Not all Go development is greenfield development.

This is one of the things I dislike the most about the Go community. Every single criticism or suggestion to the language is dismissed as being user error, without even taking into consideration the use case or the different experiences one might have, or if the codebase was gotten from somewhere else, or even acknowledging that there are other programming styles. It is a giant echo chamber with people constantly saying "works on my computer".

I do think it’s a crime that the standard library contains some empty interfaces in critical packages that seem egregious. The fact that you can accidentally pass an rsa.PublicKey (instead of a pointer to an rsa.PublicKey) to a function that takes a crypto.PublicKey interface and not find out until runtime is hard to forgive.

Anyway, I’m not just saying “works for me” but I am saying that I’m not going to let what dumb things someone else might do with the language change my enjoyment of it. This view is likely influenced by the fact that my particular projects aren’t allowed to pull in 3rd party dependencies without a thorough review, so the problem of dependency fan-out that may pull in some unfortunate code is reduced significantly.

I think this will differ from team to team. I've been working within two different companies as a Go dev so far and haven't seen any Reflection misuse issues.

The difference I see here: while Go does indeed have those features-about-to-turn problems you will be called on not use them too much or use them at all from around every corner. They are there as a necessarily evil.

At the same time meta-programming and every thing that comes with ruby's dynamic expressiveness usually is the one of the selling points.

Go has its flaws and tradeoffs, and simply things that can and will be misused but you don't see articles that promote them as something that should win you over some other language.

I disagree there. I can think of two examples of things I consider very easy to misuse in Go, but are promoted by the community as being the superior solution to problems in articles and posts all the time: Go Error Handling and Go Code Generation.

Agree

>Go Error Handling

Go error handling has its downsides but how can you misuse it? If your code may generate an error = return an error to handle elsewhere. If the code you are calling returns an error = handle it.

Also, type system ‘soundness’ is a pretty empty desire. It’s easy to create a type system that is formally sound, yet not useful. This is the same argument as ‘type correctness.’ Java programs were ‘type correct’ before Java had generics, and the type system was extremely limited.

So types are an inherently meaningless goal, because types can mean so many things.

Don't confuse not-expressive with articulate. Rust requires your to be articulate about what you're doing so you don't gloss over ownership details with fancy one liners like is common in other languages. You can be both expressive and articulate. Not worrying about memory ownership, while possible in other languages, is not the hallmark of expressiveness. For example, imagine a C analog to a Rust program that implements all the same checks and memory discipline that Rust does.. Rust is way more expressive, relatively.

Like everything human, programmers can be polar opposite without anyone being "obviously wrong."

Whatever rolls the ball.

What makes things worse they are both dynamic languages, but there's a middle ground.

It feels like Rust for example (I'm still planning to learn it) looks like have the right amount of functionality. Java or even C. I think what you experienced is the extreme case of it.

Ops is the next guy who comes in, who is only ever supposed to keep everything running. Changing things is second priority, if it's anywhere at all on the priority list. (S)he will HATE any edge case they don't know exactly what happens because it can be bad, and it's the source of all their work. They want to manually code every edge case, and have that covered by a test.

C/C++ ("smart" C++ specifically), Haskell, Lisp, ... are for the software devs.

Go, Java, C#, ... are for the software ops folks.

A large bank should probably be using Java. Someone trying to start up a new bank may prefer Haskell.

I don't see this conflict resolve any time soon. Personally I find the large bank situation somewhere between soul-crushing and suicide-inducing. But I've met plenty of people very happy in such situations, and great for them. I may even consult for them, because for 1-2 months or so software ops can be quite interesting. Figuring out how to introduce changes in a software ops org is ... usually a challenge in addition to figuring out how the software system should change.

You always come out well, because there's always large improvements that can be made because nobody's doing that. They're busy triple-checking that the next parent-teacher conference of employee 271 doesn't interfere with the oncall schedule.

And frankly, I could (and probably can still) use a few lessons in "this edge-case fuckup is not acceptable and you missed it !". I've been humbled several times by steering a large problem past all security measures of a software ops organization in the past.

>Go, Java, C#, ... are for the software ops folks.

Can't say anything about Java or C# but one of the reasons we use Go is because the requirements change often and you can adapt your code quickly.

At the same time our code (my main field is systems integration) is required to keep running obviously. New requirements should not change this fact.

So on a spectrum I'd say Go is 7/10 OPS. Subjectively.

Obviously Go probably is not the type of language you should chose for your MVP or prototyping. Unless you are sure you have a full picture in your head already.

I can simply do dict.contains("foo") in Java vs having to go through a verbose hoop:

    if val, ok := dict["foo"]; ok {
        //do something here
    }

    collection.stream().filter(...).map(...).collect(...)

At least that's the kind of thing I've heard about other verbose things you need to do in Go.

The real problem is you’ve just made up a reason that the code is that way, and the reason is also crazy. No language purposefully makes something verbose simply to discourage doing it because of a performance concern. Even if they did, key lookups are constant-time complexity and are among the most efficient things you can do in all of programming. So that wouldn’t even make sense as something you’d want to discourage.

    value, _ := map[key]

    if(map[key]) { ...

  value := map[key]

The actual reason you cannot simply write:

  if(map[key]) { ...

But you certainly can write:

  if map[key] != "" { ...

  if map[key] { ...

Because map[key] can in fact return one — or two — values, depending on its usage context.

I guess in this case the real reason is trying to force you to handle the error, and that the error and value are returned separately.

    class Foo(val delegate: Collection) : Collection by delegate
    {
        override fun length() = delegate.length() + 42
    }

    val foo = Foo(delegate: LinkedList())
    foo.add(1)
    foo.add(2)
    for e in foo {
        print(e)
    }
    foo.removeAll()
    foo.length() // = 42

Personally, I'd just rather take a collection by composition and only expose the small part of the API I actually want.

I guess though this is the standard decorator pattern you'd normally see from GoF.

I disagree that expressiveness lends to feature creep, I've personally never seen that happen, but that's another topic.

For me, the verbosity of Go would be a lot more justified if it aslo had some sort of memory safety system in place (similar to Rust) that could help prevent concurrency related errors. I understand that you're supposed to used channels for everything in Go, but last time I wrote a channel heavy concurrent server the compiler did nothing to prevent me from mutating shared state across different go-routines and I was unable to land on a pure channel based implementation (I needed a run_once to initialize some shared state and a WaitGroup to track active listeners, and this was the case in all the other impls I audited/referenced as well). I just don't feel like I'm getting a lot of value in exchange for the verbosity when writing Go.

What I fear myself is feature creep. A design by committee that ruins the language for me, and is never good enough for you.

If not, you might try 0mq, immutable lists or any other facility. Channels are just the in-process idiomatic way to communicate state, but not required at all.

Mutexes go a long way, and underpins channels anyways.

- Needing to determine ownership of closable objects passed across channels.

- Defining what special token (or OOB signaling mechanism) is used for marking end of data.

- Synchronizing who is closing the channel

Go channels are quite painful to use and often a simple lock would do better. This write-up[2] summarizes the issues with them quite nicely:

[1] https://dave.cheney.net/2014/03/19/channel-axioms [2] https://www.jtolio.com/2016/03/go-channels-are-bad-and-you-s...

can't really fault you on that either. features/looks etc. it really comes down to wether it matches how you think. I can make big claims about functional languages being superior for x y and z but if I'm being really honest with myself. its more about that fact that it fits how my brain already models problems.

If the formater allowed to write in one line if err != nil { return err }, it would drop the number of code lines by the third.

Do you have any examples? Not a golang programmer myself.

It's mostly not about the language. An exception is of course when moving from a dynamically typed interpreted language to a statically typed compiled language.

The success of projects depends much more on other things than the programming language. It's about

- Processes and standards, like following a well defined structure, testing, documentation, ...

- Maintainability of code. It must be easy to read, to understand syntactically and to build a mental model of the code

- Long term reliability and stability of the eco system

- Easy and reliable tooling

- Developer efficiency, e.g. compile times

Go shines in many of the aspects. Especially in maturity, stability, amazing standard lib and tooling. As you mention Rust: This is exactly where Rust falls short. Rust is a great language with amazing people behind it. But there are reasons why its adoption in the broad real world is very, very small. The reasons are not the language. So I always feel it's a bit invasive when Rust promoters enter Go or Java threads by telling how much better Rust as a language is.

In this example Go has additional benefits being statically typed and compiled, very fast and with build in concurrency support.

Old code always compiles.

The stdlib of Rust, I find it superior, very much so, to the one of go. Even though this is mostly due to the different type system.

The tooling around rust, it is just great, what tool you feel missing in Rust?

Few years ago, rust was lacking libraries, but they are really catching up quickly.

They are different languages that shine in different scenarios, but maturity, stability and stdlib is not where Rust is lacking behind.

That said, I think you are right about explicit nullability. A language like Go with this feature, as well as named arguments and limited ADT's could be very compelling for Go's use case.

And yet it's a top-5 most-loved language among programmers and there's no real evidence that it's popular among managers (discussed in detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27175297). Moreover, lots of open-source software exists in Go--if only managers like the language, what's the theory for why all of this software (including major software, like Kubernetes) exists? Is it managers building it in their spare time? Even then, those managers are acting as programmers (not managers) in that capacity.

With respect to the implication that only managers care about the pragmatic aspects of software development (collaboration, onboarding, readability, debugability, maintainability, etc), where did this meme come from? I get the meme that there are many programmers who value abstraction above all else, but I'm not familiar with the meme that all programmers are abstraction maximalists.

I completely disagree with this statement. Some of the most high-performance modern platform-level code written is currently written in Go.

It was a Google presentation that examined their efforts to convert their download site to Go (from C/C++) that got my attention. It's easier to read, has a simpler mental model, and faster than its C/C++ cousin.

Doesn't Java fit the same bill? (although it was kinda modern at the time)

> I think you are right about explicit nullability

Sadly it's really hard to shoe-horn this onto Go, now that the std lib is widely used. Same for proper sum types (which can then be used for multiple return values).

But the continuation of the nullability mistake puzzles me the most... And that wile Go's be designed by big name lang gurus: what were they thinking?

Yes, I think Java was an earlier attempt at this.

> Sadly it's really hard to shoe-horn this onto Go, now that the std lib is widely used. Same for proper sum types (which can then be used for multiple return values).

I agree, I think these types of features are much easier to design around than to add into a mature ecosystem later

> But the continuation of the nullability mistake puzzles me the most... And that wile Go's be designed by big name lang gurus: what were they thinking?

Is it just a timing thing? It seems like explicit nullability came onto the mainstream a few years after Go debuted, but maybe it was already discussed in academic circles before then.

I know OCaml[1] has it ('93) and Haskell[2] ('90). Also the claim that implicit nullability is a mistake was made in 2009[3] (around the same time Go was released).

Given the seniority of the designers of Go, I expect they had knowledge of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare

... if "it" is even a thing. I would say that it's not, rather implicit nullability is the thing. It's just not something you'd do in a typed language unless you really specifically chose it. That's how Hoare could claim it was his billion dollar mistake. Implicit nullability was a thing he (and subsequent language designers) opted in to.

Why is that? I have never seen a cogent explanation for why this is the case.

I can tell you why exceptions (as implemented in Java) are cool: You can write code as if every function call is successful, as opposed to adding a line (or more) of error handling code after every function call, which makes it harder to follow the logic.

If I encode my errors as values (usually with Either), I have to decide how to gracefully fall back if a failure occurs before I'm even allowed to use the successful result. Maybe I just hide the part of the view that needed that data. Maybe I show an appropriate error message. Maybe I email operations to let them know about the problem. Whatever I do, I have to actually think about it and not just assume that the error will be caught somewhere by someone. The result is usually a dramatically improved user experience when failures inevitably occur.

Exceptions tend to pass the buck so far down the line that there's no context to make an appropriate decision. Values tend to force a decision early, when you still have enough context. (Obviously both can be used against the grain, but the question is which pattern is easier.)

I beg to differ. It forces you think about whether but not why the function itself has failed. The "why" is embedded in the type of the error (or exception) itself, but Go does not force you to examine the type of the error; indeed, sheer muscle memory compels you most of the time to just write if err != nil again and again.

> I can decide how to gracefully fall back if a failure occurs before I'm even allowed to use the successful result.

You could wrap every line of Java code in a try/catch if you wanted to (it wouldn't be idiomatic, but it's definitely possible). You're just not forced to.

For what it's worth, you also shouldn't email your ops team directly from production code. It doesn't scale. You should log the error, and your monitoring stack should handle altering the relevant team (full disclosure: I work for such a monitoring stack company). It's very rare that you actually want to recover from errors, as that's typically a pattern that leads to silent failures and difficult to diagnose issues.

The lack of forcing to handle (checked) exceptions is exactly why I dislike Java's model. Until I've checked for an error state, I want to have an Either that may or may not have the data I'm looking for (and if it doesn't, has an explanation). In a truly exceptional situation I can crash and give a 500 error, but checked exceptions are by definition supposed to be recoverable, and in a production codebase I don't want to be able to lazily avoid recovering from them.

Java never lets you ignore an non-panicking exception. Unlike Go, where you CAN ignore the error value.

Besides that, Java forces you to explicitly state what type of exceptions each function can throw.

Java exceptions are stricter than Go, not vice versa.

Now, if we were talking about .Net or JS, or Python or mostly any other language with exception I'd get this criticism, but it is patently false when it comes to Java.

An attempt to read from a Reader, for example, can fail with a java.io.IOException. The javadoc for that lists 31 direct known subclasses, including CharConversionException and JMXServerErrorException; and there is always the possibility of a custom subclass from somewhere else in your application or a 3rd party library.

You can't do anything sensible with such a broad error (like decide if retrying might be sensible), so you end up either propagating it in your type signature, wrapping it in a RuntimeException, or ignoring it.

I agree that the Java standard library (especially the older parts of it) is quite bad. The Go standard library, whatever issues it has[1], is still pretty solid.

Unfortunately, the questionable quality of the Java standard library and the Java EE libraries back in the day, have led to some of the bad patterns we see nowadays in Java, that are not necessitated by the language, e.g. gross abuse of inheritance.

I still want to point out here that error values are not superior to exceptions, since:

1. Java shows exception handling can be forced to be explicit as well.

2. Handling Go errors is NOT forced. In fact, you can always ignore the functions' return value or assign the error part of it to a `_`. This is far less explicit than an empty catch block.

[1] https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-...

This is not true, and therefore your explanation is unsatisfying.

> You can write code as if every function call is successful

How does writing code as if every function call is successful (when you know that some functions will fail) not lead to some other bit of code further up the call stack having to make a decision about an exception that it doesn't have the context for? A bit of code which probably was written by a different developer who didn't anticipate what you were going to do?

There have been frameworks like the Common Lisp Condition System to let a caller dictate a recovery/retry policy, but they never caught on. In practice "do no harm, give up, and report the error" is what almost everyone wanted, and most languages support it without punitive effort.

Copy/pasting another person's answer:

You could wrap every line of Java code in a try/catch if you wanted to (it wouldn't be idiomatic, but it's definitely possible). You're just not forced to.

You can handle some of the exceptions in the same function, without going to the extreme of wrapping every line of code in a try/catch block.

Yes you ARE forced to. Unless the exception derives from RuntimeException.

In Go -- every error is obvious, and you get a sense of a cyclomatic complexity of any piece of code by just going through it quickly.

So, that's it for me. The complexity of the code is visible.

The patterns for error handling the golang have introduced are admittedly verbose, but they do lend a certain element of confidence that once the code is written, the errors should be handled. Of course a programmer can ignore the errors explicitly but doing so is different than forgetting to catch a thrown exception, because the programmer must go out of their way to write code ignoring the error. It feels like there's more agency around the decision.

Sure, you can write sloppy code in Java, but I am sure you can write sloppy code in Go too.

As you write code in a language with explicit errors, the language makes you acknowledge that the code you call can error out. This makes you stop and think what to do about the error. You can choose to ignore it, but that's a conscious decision that the language forces you to make.

With exceptions, there's no such feedback mechanism from the language/compiler. In order to write robust code you yourself must have the discipline to add exception handlers around the appropriate calls.

In short, defaults matter. It's simply easier to write correct, robust code when you don't have to go out of your way to do it.

See https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050114-00/?p=36...:

> It’s really hard to write good exception-based code since you have to check every single line of code (indeed, every sub-expression) and think about what exceptions it might raise and how your code will react to it.

... which leads us straight to favorite exceptions-caused bug: https://nedbatchelder.com//blog/202001/bug_915_solved.html:

> Inside tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile, the error handling misses the possibility that _TemporaryFileWrapper will fail.

You could ignore those, but similarly you could ignore err in Go as well.

"For the truly exceptional cases, the ones that represent either unrecoverable programming mistakes, like index out of bounds, or unrecoverable environmental problem, like running out of stack, we have panic.

For all of the remaining cases, any error conditions that you will encounter in a Go program, are by definition not exceptional — you expect them because regardless of returning a boolean, an error, or panicing, it is the result of a test in your code"

That's true in Java as well.

Java conditions you to view failure as an exception to the rule, and the happy path as the real code (which is the attitude you express in your first comment). Lots of us have since observed that this approach to failure leads to errors because programmers ignore failures, allowing them to be handled by a catch-all at the top of the stack, which typically just dumps a stacktrace and calls it a day.

The paradigm espoused by Go sees errors as just another program state, and one whose implications are just as important to consider as the desired behavior. This forces programmers to consider all the implications of a failure, rather than just adding another `throws` clause.

That's not typical Java code. You could do that in quick & dirty code, but I haven't seen such code in production code.

It sounds to me like you're an extremely lucky person. I've seen too much of that sort of thing in production code, including a catch-all for Throwable at the top that didn't even dump a stacktrace.

https://dave.cheney.net/2014/11/04/error-handling-vs-excepti...

https://dave.cheney.net/2015/01/26/errors-and-exceptions-red...

In other words, I also don't understand the hype around error values.

So, back to Python, what error value is suitable for replacing an exception? I mean, Python is flexible enough to do Go-style error values, but what does a good error value look like? Maybe I just haven't seen good error values?

If an error happens way down in the weeds and I initially return a very specific error value, do I just pass it up the stack forever? If so, how is that different than traditional exceptions? Do I replace the specific error value with more general error values as I move up the stack to higher-level code? If so, then I am throwing valuable information away and am likely to end up with something like "not found" as my error value at a the top -- not very useful.

I would probably also do some error logging, capturing the state of relevant local variables, especially if it is one of those cases where "see an error" is unexpected.

I suppose they're two sides of the same coin. Both can be done well or poorly.

I do resent the idea that error values are automatically better or easier to understand, because I'm dealing with some poorly done error values now and wishing for traditional exception handling.

Either is fine, I think. But, don't mix both in the same codebase. And with exceptions, I would really like Common Lisp-style restartable errors, to get the flexibility I feel I have with error values.

Go is a language to get the job done. It's for the masses. It's this type of language you write a blog post on how you have done this and that and why instead of a scientific paper. It's really the boring mortar.

OTOH it will pay your rent.

The language actively hinders any attempts to be fancy or "expressive". You write (or copy/paste) the same pattern(s) over and over again.

On the other hand, you can pick up pretty much anyone's Go codebase and quickly see how it works. No need to figure out what flavour of metaprogramming or other fancy crap the original author was a fan of at the time of writing.

It's boring, it pays the bills. You can be expressive with other languages on your own time.

No, it's not. Unhandled errors that aren't noticed just lead to undefined/nondeterministic behavior and some really nasty bugs. And moreover, I literally cannot understand how it is possible for any programmer to not realize this (compare: elixir's approach, which instead embraces errors and restarts processes instantly).

Give Go a map and option and I'll be a happy gopher.

None of that is too uncommon, with the notable exception that Go is better at the "quick onboarding" part since it goes out of the way offering no new concepts or syntax that have to be learnt; something that the comment I was replying to would like to change by introducing Optionals and Functors.

For example if you try to use some numeric types that are not int, int32, float64 (for example float32 or uint16) you'll be in a lot of pain due to constant casting back and forth. Yes generics could solve this one too.

I also couldn't make myself enjoy programming in it. I think it's because it tried to be simple, so anyone can learn it. Because of it is kind of rare to say that you created with a creative way of solving specific problem.

That's very different to for example C, to which Go (at least early on) was compared to.

Then there's Rust designed around low-level code and memory safety, and a much more complex syntax.

I think it just goes to show that any language (modern or otherwise) is a consequence of its design decisions (or lack of).

Can you elaborate on that? Usually the argument on which one is better is that it depends on use case.