Hacker News Reader

But five functions that return a value and an error would each have to run the if err != nil dance whereas with method chaining it's cleaner

View on HN

not if each one can fail. What if call #1 and call #3 can return the same error.. how does the caller know which one failed? This is the same as wrapping a bunch of calls with a catch (Exception) ... you lose context of what failed and can't behave differently for different failures. All you can do is perform a generic "something went wrong" behavior.

Interestingly you _can_ implement method chaining to require a terminal method call i.e. err := GetFoo().SetBar(1).SetBaz(2).Run() and then each chained method would set an error property in the object and if err!=nil then do nothing but return the object, and then the last method could return the error value.

That said, I am not a huge fan of fluent interfaces. I much prefer passing in a struct as an "args" parameter, in most case (but not all.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com