It seems like returning a tuple would also result in a lot of repetitive code to unpack and check the error value from it. What would that look like?
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Returning a tuple is also a bad implementation, because you don't actually want to return the result and the error, but rather either the result or the error. It would still be much better than the special-cased multiple return value since you can actually have code reuse for it.
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As in you can write functions / methods taking (ResultType, ErrorType) and compose them together. Of course, that's not going to work very well without the ability to write code that's generic across types, which is tied into this too. Go is quite hostile towards code reuse.
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It seems like a consequence of core decisions about the type system (e.g. not supporting algebraic data types). I'm not sure if I'd agree that it's hostile to code reuse, you just have to reuse at a higher level of abstraction (libraries).
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It doesn't have good support for reuse via libraries since in so many cases it forces writing specialized code or use the awful hack of reflection and dynamic casting. In that sense it's a lot like Java before it had half-baked generics. I wouldn't call these conscious decisions.
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To be a conscious decision, they would have needed an understanding of the other design choices and experience with them. It's clear they didn't. The decisions would make some sense in a world where only terrible type systems and generics like the ones in Java and C++ existed.
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I wouldn’t presume that they were unfamiliar, but instead chose simplicity of compiler implementation over other approaches. There are many cases where there are trade-offs between simplicity of implementation vs. interface and the Go authors come from a philosophy of the former.
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I don't think Go has simple or minimal language design. It has a lot of special cases and hard-wired solutions to problems, rather than elegant features fitting together well. It's the opposite of having small, reusable solutions to problems like composability of *nix utilities.
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The spirit of Go is hard-wiring special-cased features into the language, in a way that programmers cannot implement themselves. The Go designers can make generic types like arrays, slices and maps, but you can't. They can do product types (multiple return values), but you can't.
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It's hostile towards code reuse and programmers. It's deliberately bad, and aimed at what they think fits the lowest common denominator, but I don't think it succeeds at that. The language not providing solutions doesn't make the problems go away. Sometimes worse is just worse.
The features it has are awkward to use together and don't compose well. It's everything that they claim is bad about languages with good type systems. Interfaces end up being awkward and force a lot of boilerplate and repetition. Those are so close to being great, but they fail.
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Reflection and dynamic casting are language features that I dislike even more than exceptions and class-based inheritance, and Go forces people to lean on those even more than a language like Java infested with it. I'm really not a fan of approaches it takes nearly all around.
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