Same. That has tripped me so many times when trying out something simple in golang.
I get why they are undesirable in the long run, but in the short run I'm often trying out a fragment and don't have the users of every variable written yet.
When you're exploring, you don't want your compiler to stop you in your tracks to warn you about pedantic nonsense. It's not a syntax error that prevents your compiler from understanding, it's just arbitrary restriction that the compiler decides to pester your about, a sort of a robotic grammar nazi.
Computers are obtuse, the worst thing they can do is ignore your perfectly parseable and valid instructions for arbitrary reasons. Machine, if you know I'm not using a variable, kindly let me know and carry on doing your job.
i don't actually know what he was hacking on at berkeley
You guys want to have your cake and eat it too -- to be correct despite being lazy and sloppy.
It makes no sense. Bite the bullet. Don't have unused variables. There's no such thing as "exploration". After you've "explored" enough (where "explored" means "coded sloppily"), you've quickly exhausted your mental buffer, and it's suddenly expensive to go back and polish what you've done, making yesterday's exploration today's (hopefully not too creaky) foundation.
This is one where faster local development (because you don't have to repeatedly, jarringly stop what you're doing and patch up something that doesn't matter) and clean source in a common repo are both possible and very easy to achieve.
But whatever. Yay go.
If I need to use analysers to fix that, I already have those for C and C++ for the last 30 years.