I don't think this argument holds much weight. I understand and agree that the majority is not always correct. But then what was the point of the developer survey, if that data is irrelevant? Isn't the existence of the developer survey an implicit statement by the Go team that they care about what Go developers think? There is also a very similar argument here which was central to the generics debate and was one of the major arguments in favor of implementing generics - that it would significantly help some people, and it wouldn't hurt anyone else very much. So similarly, "I don't mind it the way it is" is not a very good argument.
I don't speak for the Go team, but my impression is that they do care about this issue, and would like to reduce the boilerplate/verbosity of error handling if they could. But that they have seen hundreds of different proposals (thousands if you include variations on a theme), and haven't found any that qualify for the requirements that are more important to Go's nature than just verbosity. On Tuesday, August 1, 2023 at 4:10:57 AM UTC-4 Jan Mercl wrote: > On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 1:47 AM DrGo <salah....@gmail.com> wrote: > > > The verbosity of error handling is the number one concern for Go > developers in the most recent survey. > > That says something about those developers, about their preferences, > opinions, taste etc and that it differs from what the Original > Language Designers (OLD™) preferred. > > It has close to zero bits of information which preferences are the > better ones. It's a subjective category anyway. > > > So there is a need for doing something about it.. > > And here's IMO the mistake. You may feel the need, Joe and Mary may > not. It's ok to have preferences. It's ok for preferences to be > different. It does not mean there's a need to change anything. Of > course, you can decide that following the preferences of a majority of > developers is a rational move. > > I claim it a fallacy. A big one. Let me not joke about billion flies, > but the fact is - language designers are few and far between while > developers come in heaps. And let's be honest. Most developers write > horrible code, me included. Maybe you're the rare exception, congrats > then. But the majority of us are just the ordinary, average coders for > hire. There are deadlines to meet, bills to pay, project mis-managers > getting into the way etc. We have all experienced that, didn't we? > > I, for one learned to pay much more attention to what language > designers do and say. Sometimes I agree, sometime I don't. But I > believe one can, in essence, ignore what the majority of developers > thinks about it. Actually, I think the majority of developers is wrong > more often than the, most of the time silent, minority. > > -j > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/7efa2d28-44c6-4089-b28a-90fe770a9003n%40googlegroups.com.
