Things about programming I learned with Go

"There is nothing exceptional in exceptions"

No there's not, but it's a royal pain the arse to have to keep passing them up through your function calls to the level that actually cares about them and will do something about them. Try/catch eliminates boilerplate.

> Thanks to goroutines and channels Go programmers can take a different approach. Instead of using locks to control access to a shared resource, they can simply use channels to pass around its pointer. Then only a goroutine that holds the pointer can use it and make modifications to the shared structure.

How does this prevent data races if more than one goroutine holds a pointer to the shard structure and they're running concurrently?

It doesn't.

'A more meaningful statement would be: "use inheritance to express sum types, use composition to express product types."'

I'm not sure how well that works as a meaningful statement, because it assumes that the reader has a solid grasp of what a sum type and a product type are. If not (and I make the perhaps dubious assumption based on my own experience and knowledge that most programmers, especially most people using mainstream languages like Go or C++ or Python will not) then it doesn't really convey any information, unfortunately. I think a lot more people will know roughly what inheritance and composition are.

I'm no Go expert, so the following may just come from having not used it enough.

The two things that shocked me out of continuing with Go were exception handling and package management.

Exception handling is basically not implemented. Instead the Go developers dediced to add half a step from return codes towards exceptions and work with that. And now the community seems to have decided to just reraise everything that comes their way. Nobodoy seems to see that such a simple basic feature shouldn't require a piece of code, it should be done automatically by the language. And the community doesn't seem to see why it's nearly impossible to debug. I really hope that Go developers have some secret tools I just don't know about, because there are no stack traces, and on the abstraction level of a user getting an error from an underlying framework printed out doesn't really help at all, especially when the code seems to continue after printing the error (making it a bug, by reporting a warning as an error). My favorite example is kubernetes helm reporting a connection error in my job's infrastructure, every time you use it, but after that error it actually switches from IPv6 to IPv4 and just works. But still it feels good about reporting that error. wtf.

The next thing is package management. I had high hopes here after going through the trouble of working on that topic in 2012 when the Python community was developing its package management. I mean if you don't add that on top of an existing world, but create it from scratch, there is a chance to just do it right and not have to bother with all the pains of legacy systems, right? Well, Go decided it doesn't need versioning on imports. Just put the Github link there, don't even choose a branch. How can any code ever get finished that way? My best guess is that now they have to develop stuff on top of that already-born-as-legacy system and also try to integrate that with their core. Sad.

I really hope someone can add some corrections to this view.