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Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

I was mostly thinking of Java. Ignoring an exception would be done with try {....} catch (Exception e) {}, while in Go, you would do: x,_ := f(...). And if you want to check a returned error I think the if err!=nil {...} is still a bit less typing than the Java version, and you don't have to declare checked exceptions you might throw.

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In Go, if you call three functions you need to repeat the

  x, err := do_something()
  if err != nil {
          return nil, err
  }

ceremony three times. In Java it happens by default, because the language designers agreed this is by far the most common case.

Ignoring an error is almost always a serious mistake, so the fact that Go makes it easy and not blatant is not a good thing.

>ceremony three times. In Java it happens by default,

What happens by default? Not clear. (I know Java, but not up to date with recent versions.)

>Ignoring an error is almost always a serious mistake

Agreed.

In Java, an exception outside a catch block automatically stops the method and raises the exception to the caller, and then their caller, and so on. In Go you have to write this after every function call (except the tiny minority that can only panic).

Thanks. I did know that about Java (having used it), just that it was not clear to me from your earlier wording, that that is what you were saying. NP.

Yes, I certainly was not advocating ignoring any error. Which is, why exceptions are of dubious use. If you only check exceptions around a larger block of function calls, or every several levels of the call stack, then you might miss the exact source of the exception, unless the exception type is unambiguous. That is, why I find the Go version tedious for sure, but still better than to wrap single function calls into try... catch.

Got it now.

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