Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

We were talking about PL features, and now you bring up a style of writing said language (which by the way comes from very different times and is no longer the norm)?

Composition over inheritance has been a mantra in Java circles for a very long time now. The important difference is for example that Go can’t have proper error handling no matter how good the developer is, due to the language not having a proper abstraction over that.

View on HN

That's a feature not a bug. Go intentionally forgoes abstractions of that sort. I personally prefer well written Java exception handling, but often Java exception handling code is a bolted on afterthought. Go's approach is to make error handling something you have to think about for virtually every line of code, rather than a superstructure built around the code. This can feel slow and painful to write, but it guides the developer toward considering each error case individually, potentially resulting in more nuanced responses to errors. It also makes reading the code dead simple.

> Go's approach is to make error handling something you have to think about for virtually every line of code

But that doesn’t work, and you can’t handle every error at the place of its origin.

Seems to me like it does work, based on many successful projects using it. There's nothing that forces you to handle the error at the place of origin, you can pass it on like you do with exceptions. You just can't bubble it up multiple levels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com