• Marxism-Fennekinism@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    Sometimes I think Go was specifically made for Google to dictate its own preferences on the rest of us like some kind of power play. It enforces one single style of programming too much.

    • philm@programming.dev
      0·
      2 years ago

      Is this a hard error? Like it doesn’t compile at all?

      Isn’t there something like #[allow(unused)] in Rust you can put over the declaration?

      • flame3244@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        Yes it is a hard error and Go does not compile then. You can do _ = foobar to fake variable usage. I think this is okay for testing purposes.

  • CodeBlooded@programming.dev
    21·
    2 years ago

    If this language feature is annoying to you, you are the problem. You 👏are 👏 the 👏 reason 👏 it 👏 exists.

    I worked in places where the developers loaded their code full of unused variables and dead code. It costs a lot of time reasoning about it during pull request and it costs a lot of time arguing with coworkers who swear that they’re going to need that code in there next week (they never need that code).

    This is a very attractive feature for a programming language in my opinion.

    PS: I’m still denying your pull request if you try to comment the code instead.

    ❗️EDIT: A lot of y’all have never been to programming hell and it shows. 🪖 I’m telling you, I’ve fixed bayonets in the trenches of dynamically typed Python, I’ve braved the rice paddies of CICD YAML mines, I’ve queried alongside SQL Team Six; I’ve seen things in production, things you’ll probably never see… things you should never see. It’s easy to be against an opinionated compiler having such a feature, but when you watch a prod deployment blow up on a Friday afternoon without an easy option to rollback AND hours later you find the bug after you were stalled by dead code, it changes you. Then… then you start to appreciate opinionated features like this one. 🫡

    • m_f@midwest.social
      3·
      2 years ago

      That’s 👏 what 👏 CI 👏 is 👏 for

      Warn in dev, enforce stuff like this in CI and block PRs that don’t pass. Go is just being silly here, which is not surprising given that Rob Pike said

      Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic numerals.

      The Go developers need to get over themselves.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, insisting on things like a variable being used will result in people using work arounds. It won’t result in people not doing it.

        Then, because people trust the language to police this rule, the work-arounds and debug code will get committed.

        func main() {  
    test := true  
}

        Oops, golang doesn’t like that.

        func main() {  
    test := true  
    _ = test  
}

        Perfectly cromulent code.

        If they really wanted to avoid people having unused variables, they should have used a naming convention. Any variable not prefixed by “_” or “_debug_” or whatever has to be used, for example. Then block any code being checked in that still contains those markers.

      • FlumPHP@programming.dev
        0·
        2 years ago

        What’s a situation where you need an unused variable? I’m onboard with go and goland being a bit aggressive with this type of thing, but I can’t think of the case where I need to be able to commit an unused variable.

        • m_f@midwest.social
          1·
          2 years ago

          You probably wouldn’t be committing this, unless you’re backing up a heavily WIP branch. The issue is that if you’re developing locally and need to make a temporary change, you might comment something out, which then requires commenting another now-unused variable, which then requires commenting out yet another variable, and so on. Go isn’t helping you here, it’s wasting your time for no good reason. Just emit a warning and allow CI to be configured to reject warnings.

        • jormaig@programming.dev
          0·
          2 years ago

          Have you looked at the post? Use case: you are testing something or playing around and you want to try something. That’s supper common

    • Urik@lemmy.ca
      1·
      2 years ago

      That’s a problem with your workplace, not the language nor OP.
      You could have a build setting for personal development where unused variables are not checked, and then a build setting for your CI system that will look for them. It gives you freedom to develop the way you want without being annoyed when you remove something just to test something, but will not merge your PR unless the stricter rules are met.

      • LittleLordLimerick@lemm.ee
        01·
        2 years ago

        Why in the world would you want to develop something that doesn’t follow the coding rules required by your org, just so you can go back and fix everything before submitting a PR? That’s just extra work.

        • planish@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          2 years ago

          Because you want to know if the first half of the code works at all before you write the whole second half.

          Finding all the bits that will be used by the second half and changing the declarations to just expressions is a bunch of extra work. As is adding placeholder code to use the declared variables.

          • LittleLordLimerick@lemm.ee
            0·
            2 years ago

            I’m having a hard time envisioning a situation where testing my code requires a bunch of unused variables. Just don’t declare the variables until you’ve started writing the code that uses them…

            • Urik@lemmy.ca
              0·
              2 years ago

              Most of the time you don’t write the code, you change it.

              I had tons of situations where I wanted to test deleting a code block which just happened to use an imported library, which the compiler is now complaining about because it’s no longer being used.

    • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      2 years ago

      I was working for a team that did quality control on the code of an entire financial group and it’s still amazing to me the shit we let through.
      I feel annoyed even having compiler warnings in my code and here we were downgrading errors into warnings so the code would go through, or adding rules exceptions for a program so the team responsible could push a hotfix to prod… It’s all shit. All the way down.

      I dream of working with such a strict language.

      • Nato Boram@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        “Other people” are what’s wrong with me. People don’t use linters/formatters/type annotations when it’s optional and produce dogshite code as a result. Having the compiler itself enforce some level of human decency is a godsend.

  • fkn@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    Also Go: exceptions aren’t real, you declare and handle every error at every level or declare that you might return that error because go fuck yourself.

      • fkn@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        Wow. I’m honestly surprised I’m getting downvotes for a joke. Also, no. It isn’t. It really isn’t.

        • gornius@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 years ago

          It is better than in most languages with exceptions, except from languages like Java, that require you to declare that certain method throws certain error.

          It’s more tedious in Go, but at the end of the day it’s the same thing.

          When I use someone else’s code I want to be sure if that thing can throw an error so I can decide what to do with it.