This is something I've asked repeatedly at my job. Current team builds services for other developers to use, okay, do we also use it so we can go th ough all the same pain points as them? Why not?!
> And yes, that is literally why I don't support direct cash handouts to the homeless. You can feed them and house them, you can't throw money at them and expect a good outcome.
You maintain this despite all the research showing that this is the most effective way to help people?
The dolby/thx stuff for headphone s is done at the software level. It's just preset filters provided by synapse. There is no hardware dolby unless you get into the PCI audio card stuff, or audiophile dedicated sound board setups. Different USB DAC might impact noise levels. If you don't have noticeable audio artifacts then there's not really any reason to use another one.
Neither, the author is pointing out the desire of the enslaver, not the actual outcome. But I don't think their logic takes into account access to means to 'outsmart' the enslaver. It's trying to frame it as a single instance equation, not a societal one to try and show the underlying contradiction of desire.
At least, that's what I'm pulling from the quote, have not read the full context.
And this is -exactly- one of the reasons they didn't accept or continue with a sane proposal for more ergonomic error handling. I like go, but this was the one thing that I kept feeling like I was wasting so much time dealing with.
While the proposed slightly reduced the token count, saving the average typist approximately 1 second of time if they don't have an autocomplete editor that types it for them, it doesn't change anything about the mental model where the real time is actually spent, so is it really sane?
Worse, it is dependent on the error type, but errors are not always of the error type. Not even Go's own standard library consistently returns errors using the error type, never mind all the other crazy things you find in the wild.
That doesn't sound sane at all.
It is true that Go not having any real kind of superpositions or side channels makes stealing popular ideas from other languages impossible (it already has both well-known error handling methods that do not depend on those properties). But a sane proposal would be designed with that in mind.
Reducing syntactic noise is about legibility, not writing ease. The error boilerplate as it exists interrupts the actual logic and makes most of your code read as sad paths that might never execute.
Of course if you want something less specific to errors, we already have do-notation as an excellent example to look at. And you can't say that's more complex for users than what they did with iterators.
> The error boilerplate as it exists interrupts the actual logic and makes most of your code read as sad paths that might never execute.
Yes! You have to think through and account for edge cases. "Might not" is the same as "might." Those branches might execute.
I have been on many projects over 25 years of software development. Projects that take error handling seriously tend to be better all around. Happy-path coding is naive.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, you want to trivially send the error up the stack to be handled, so you don't want to incur the noise in the middle of your business logic (and indeed doing so obscures the times when error handling is non-trivial!). e.g. Scala handles all error cases with compile time checking (in fact it tends to take error handling much more seriously), but you don't have to write (or read) the trivial case.
> In the overwhelming majority of cases, you want to trivially send the error up the stack to be handled
There is no case where you would ever trivially send the error up the stack.
First, if your function doesn't have any meaningful information to add, you need to seriously question why the function exists. It is almost certainly not adding anything of value and the function that originally produces the error can just as well be called directly. No need to trivially pass an error when the useless "middleman" function doesn't exist.
Second, even if you still decide that a function that doesn't have worthwhile information is still worthwhile having, if you pass someone else's error straight through then you become forever coupled to the implementation of someone else. If you, for example, pass a SQLite error and then later decide you want to use Postgres, now you have to emulate SQLite errors every time Postgres produces an error, bringing you back to square one while also having one hell of a confusing API. Unless you hate other programmers and are purposely trying to make their life a living hell, the only sensible approach is to produce new error values at each step so that you can maintain stable sentinels/types.
A good language solution for errors might make it look like you are trivially passing an error up the stack while using some other method to attach the necessary metadata, like we see in some other languages, but nobody has yet figured out how to make that fit into Go. It is generally agreed upon that Go would greatly benefit from this, but until someone rolls up their sleeves and solves it...
Functions exist first to give names to conceptual blocks, and should generally be defined by "level of abstraction." i.e. you give a name to some task that then perhaps calls some low level data validation or manipulation functions which can return errors. Your business process might not care which task had an error, so it just bubbles up to the higher level coordinator (e.g. a handler just returning errors to a router).
You do not need to have new wrappers at every level. That's what interfaces are for. e.g. if all you're going to do is retry up to N times and log, and you don't need special handling, you just call String() or whatever. But you still want libraries to return domain errors so that you can handle them if you need to, or for tests, etc. And you can have some layer in the middle to make like SQLError or DatabaseError.
Right I'm saying Scala does exactly that, and has libraries that e.g. propagate stack traces across fibres automatically and invisibly. There's prior art to observe. It's not some mysterious unsolved problem.
> Functions exist first to give names to conceptual tasks
Right, and conceptual tasks will almost always have information that is usefully attached to an error. There are exceptions, but even in those exceptions you still have to ensure you don't leak implementation details, so you still cannot trivially pass the error through.
> Your business process might not care which task had an error
That's true, but you would never write upstream functions with the business process in mind. That is for the downstream functions to determine. Doing so would couple an upstream function to the business process, making it difficult (maybe even impossible) to use again when the next business process wants to reuse it, which would be complete insanity. A function is written to provide what makes the function useful for the sake of the function itself. It is up to the caller to decide what facets of that are useful for the business process being implemented downstream.
> You do not need to have new wrappers at every level.
You absolutely do need them. The language can work to hide that they are being created, but that does not preclude the necessity of them. This is most definitely a solved problem in other languages, but it remains that nobody has figured out how to take those ideas and apply them in Go. What was done in another language cannot be lifted wholesale and simply dropped into Go. The world is not quite so simple. It remains an unsolved problem in Go.
And understandably so. Who has time to work on solving the problem when there are comments on HN complaining that nobody has solved it yet to be made?
> In the overwhelming majority of cases, you want to trivially send the error up the stack to be handled
Maybe so, but for JVM languages, this "trivially" includes a stack trace. Go doesn't offer that for normal errors and there was no clear path to getting it. The need for contextual clues when debugging, and the community and then stdlib settling on error-wrapping as the way to do it, makes "simply return err" not a sane default anymore.
That's just pointing out another layer of noise Go introduces. Here again in Scala, you can get stack traces for free with no extra syntax with value-based errors. There are already solutions for doing these things that have been used in anger for many years.
In a language that takes error handling seriously, you have domain types for errors, type checking for exhaustive error handling, and you get info like a stack trace out of the box.
Ignoring the stack trace matter, which is explored in the sibling thread, it seems to me you're really taking issue with two of Go's language design choices that aren't specifically about errors: structural typing and the lack of proper discriminated unions.
There is nothing special about an error in Go, and there is no type hierarchy to anchor them against anyway. An error can be a struct{} carrying no value at all, or simple integer with no way to carry context, etc. Error-wrapping is the solution that has been devised to work within these constraints, but there's no obvious way to compose that with the various ideas around reducing boilerplate. For a point of comparison, Rust's anyhow crate was able to square this circle by adding a blanket trait impl for Context, but Go has no equivalent for that. (Also, Rust's ? operator is implemented using unstable components, allowing the details to evolve even while the feature itself is usable in stable Rust, something which also has no equivalent in Go).
As to the lack of discriminated unions, I agree wholeheartedly. There have been some proposals recently to get them into the language, with various levels of conservatism and cohesion with the rest of the language, but a lot of them are faltering on the "every type must have a well defined zero value" issue (yet another design decision that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with errors).
As an aside, the "every type must have a zero value" is another level of insanity akin to pi must be 3: tempting to want it to be true but disastrously wrong. You're basically making known good practice (RAII/make invalid states unrepresentable) impossible, especially when you combine it with the lack of if-expressions. It also breaks parametric reasoning since now a function `() => a` exists.
I had to argue about this years ago with a coding standard pushing to define local variables at the top of functions and zero initialize them in C. Why default to null pointers or worse (invalid ints/structures) when you could make use of uninitialized variables be a compiler error instead!?
Every value must have a zero value was congruent with the dynamic languages of the time, which is signifiant as Go was designed to "feel like a dynamic language" that was able to handle production scale (i.e. something that could handle Google-sized loads). There is a good possibility that Go wouldn't have even had a static type system if they had figured out how to make dynamic typing fast.
That may seem out of place in the world you live in, but Go was created in a world where Python, Ruby, and Javascript were the languages all the cool kids were using. Go was intended to be the language for C++ programmers who had to use C++ for performance reasons but wished they could use Python instead.
Insanity, perhaps, but Go was designed to solve a problem for the world it lived in. You don't get to choose your circumstances. For those living in paradise, they can use the languages designed for their world.
Technically, Java has the same rule, it's just that all user-defined types are reference types, and so the zero value for them is always spelled "null". I'm not sure how Scala pretends otherwise, but I have worked with Kotlin, and non-nullable object fields and method arguments are always a bit of a lie, since the underlying JVM machinery permits, and defaults to, null. (Despite the original authors of Go being unfamiliar with Java, they do seem to have settled on a number of the same decisions.)
Personally, I'm fine with discriminated unions always allowing "nil" in Go, since IMO the most sensible way to implement them anyway is as a special case of interfaces. Not everyone feels the same way, though.
> Go doesn't offer that for normal errors and there was no clear path to getting it.
It does offer that for normal errors if you pass those errors via exceptions. Although you're right that using exceptions for error handling is pretty weird and generally avoided in Go, much to the chagrin of Java developers.
The Upspin experiment, which eventually shaped the error additions that did make it into Go, showed a clear path to getting it in errors themselves, but it also revealed that nobody actually uses them when available. The research found that even with stack traces attached, developers didn't bother looking at them. Thus why that bit didn't make it into Go.
Yes, I don't think stack traces are a silver bullet. They tell you the path taken through the code, but rarely do they tell you why that path was taken. I don't know what Scala stack traces look like specifically, but I've done my fair share of parsing Java stack traces, and they usually just get you in the vicinity of the problem without really telling you the cause. This was best illustrated with the standard exception that was thrown when a hostname failed to resolve, where the message did not contain the hostname. This one was solvable (and did get solved AFAIK), but in a lot of other cases, the relevant context is not available at the depth where the exception is thrown, necessitating exception-wrapping.
> Reducing syntactic noise is about legibility, not writing ease.
Exactly, which said proposal does nothing to improve upon. Despite the reduction in characters it looks exactly the same as the traditional way, offering no way to improve how one think about errors. That proposal was clearly thrown out there just to try and appease the "Go doesn't have error handling" crowd without any thought into what would actually make the language better. The goal may be noble, but that particular proposal was rightfully abandoned.
> The error boilerplate as it exists interrupts the actual logic
Huh? No matter what logic you throw at the problem, there is no escaping that error handling is part of the actual logic. And it is, by far, the most important piece of the logic. Engineering is all about dealing with failure modes.
I'll grant you that there is a category of problems known as scripting tasks where error states simply can mean letting the program crash and allowing the user to clean up afterwards, but Go is clearly not trying to be a scripting language.
I agree the ? proposal seems bad, which is why I didn't speak directly to it (but gave do notation as an example of a better solution that addresses the concern about special syntax for `error` specifically). Just the idea that explicit if err! = nil return err everywhere is somehow useful.
My experience with high level banking and low-level networking applications is that the default path for error handling is that you want to bubble up to central handlers the vast majority of the time. There's a reason why exceptions are a popular language feature; they're just hard to make work with fibres. With scripting you often don't want to handle errors at all. Just set -euo.
I don't think any form of automated adoption of orphaned packages will ever work, it's just too easy to introduce malicious code into an otherwise functional but no longer maintained source.
Maybe I just missed the boat on hashicorp and similar solutioning, but I find a lot of the solutions for working with multiple systems using an intermediary shared language, such as terraform, end up obfuscating the problems they intend to solve and result in people who deal with and support those systems on a daily basis having very little understanding of how to interact and troubleshoot the core infra that is being built up with those tools.
Yes, building those solutions requires a lot of expertise, but I've never found the tools to be worth engaging with over just using what the standard platform tools they abstract away were replacing. Then you add in the economic rug-pull scenarios that have happened when utilizing software like this and I wonder why everyone hops on the bandwagon so easily.
What is the company they're building trying to solve that system maintainers can't already do? Isn't this just rebuilding OS windowing?
At the risk of sounding like a booster, I have noodled over whether this is a place that AI can legitimately provide some improvements. It's harder than just waving an AI at the problem, which is why we don't really have this yet. But one of the major issues with the intermediary language you're talking about is the rigidity of conventionally-applied programming. AI is a bit more flexible and gooey and more able to function as duct tape and bailing wire... but that does come with several tradeoffs of its own that need to be mitigated to some degree.
As a specific example of this, I've been using emacs since about 1997, but it's only this year that I've started down this sort of "integrate everything" road that it promises, because I've never wanted to learn emacs' specific Lisp variant that is used nowhere else. But now with AI I've done more emacs extensions that are providing real value to me than I have in the last... ever. About my previous limit was reifying a keyboard macro into a command, which still isn't really programming emacs.
The ability to indicate "intent" in a way that computers can actually process it as "intent" might change the calculus enough to make this more possible than it used to be in the past.
But those tradeoffs are real. Non-determinism is a problem. Difficulty in knowing what the AI is doing unless you're staring at its output, and even the ability to conceivably monitor an AI's output is only a transient thing we have at the moment, they'll speed up past our ability to monitor them at all soon enough. But it's at least a new area that can be explored and there may be solutions to some problems in there we couldn't reach before.
Looking really cynically, it does seem like it might transition into some kind of cloud-development situation. Your "one access to all development" is one ssh away from our mega 24/7 online compute farm, since we need to keep the sessions persistent. But you can access anything you want!
There is value in abstracting the underlying generic systems into more context-relevant primitives for people who just want to get shit done in that context.
Why not meet people where they are at?
If this product isn't valuable, then it will fail. I suspect it will not fail.
I get that premise, I guess I've just been around a lot of bad engineers that use these types of tools as crutches but can't actually articulate or diagnose problems well. They just regurgitate the syntax like it's a magic spell.
We're talking about abstracting generic OS windowing/multiplexing for what sounds like an agent-based development workflow modality where you're referring to what's happening in the panes/tabs/windows instead of the containers themselves.
I think the damage/risk here isn't explicitly about exfiltration, but could also just be damage/harm to the organization through re-writing content in documents.
Im not sure airline history agrees with you. My cursory knowledge from prior posts on HN like this had mentioned regulation/deregulation played a huge part in shaping the ways that airlines competed. I've heard that airlines don't compete on price/feature as much anymore because they don't have to, and kickbacks from all the credit card offerings/deals. Anecdotally I've noticed this year major airlines pulling out of certain hubs (southwest) so there is even less competition, but prices still seemed to go down among the remaining options!
Im not sure how accurate this is, so willing to be shown differently!
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