varFoo, err := GetFoo()

if err != nil {

    return err

Can be written as:

varFoo := GetFoo()?

Just like Rust, everyone would stop complaining about Go error handling. But they have this absolutist position on syntactic sugar, even for something like this that would make the language that much nicer to look at and work with.

It is possible that with other error-related features added to the language you could avoid those traps, but Go doesn't feature those either, so simply adding that construct without thinking about the problem much more deeply doesn't buy you much.

If you are solving a stop the world when you encounter an error-type problem that might be okay, although I'd argue that you may as well panic instead. But, again, Go isn't designed for those problems and I'm not sure it needs to be. There are already plenty of good languages designed for that type of work.

The reasonable thing is perhaps to log it there at most, and bubble it up (possibly wrapped as you mentioned). It can be handled for example by a request handler, by returning a 50_ error.

But other layers of abstraction lose their utility value if they start to make assumptions about the caller. Maybe in your web service a 50x stop the world error is all you'll ever need if there is a database error, but the next guy using the code for another purpose could have very different requirements and when you have to actually deal with errors, exceptions become a royal pain very quickly. As such, the official line is simply that you shouldn't let errors casted to exceptions cross package boundaries.

But, again, Go isn't really designed for stop the world programming and it's okay to use another tool if your problem space is suited to stopping the world.

The nature and culture of Go makes it harder to change direction and be as amenable, but the merits of such conservatism is a "depends" type of thing and can mean incorporating things many years after it has become fashionable or accepted.

I'm used to a question mark being around null handling, but you know, JVM languages lol, null is thought about a lot.

Go is an experiment in the exactly opposite direction: language puts pressure to really handle the error in a meaningful way every time. And if you bubble up, at least describe the situation a little bit better. Or explicitly give up and receive a penalty for that: the `return err` is nothing to be proud of, it's just a visual penalty for _lack_ of error handling.

I'm not saying it's better in every project, I'm saying it's valuable on some projects.

What kind of utopian programming job do you have that you don't have to think about errors? An error is not limited to technical issues like packet loss or unable to open socket. Its also "client A attempted to purchase item B which is limited to client C". How do you express this in Go?

I have no idea why people are so opposed to ADTs. Its like sliced bread with butter, or whatever the phrase is. Its not _that_ complicated...is it?

My job primarily requires thinking about errors. It is why I wish for Go-style errors in the languages I use.

But on rare occasions I write things like batch scripts, automations, etc. in which failure means addressing the issue in realtime and trying again. There you don't care much about errors other than ensuring that the world stops when an error occurs to allow you to fix the problem before continuing.

While contrived, if you run into a "client A attempted to purchase item B which is limited to client C" error in this space you're probably going to have to phone them up and tell them that you can't process the transaction, apologize for the mistake, remove record of their purchase, and then once complete run the script again. The program crashing with an error message is sufficient here.

Different tools for different jobs.

I'm not sure what the better way to do it is tbh.

Pollute implies that it is unwanted, but this is something you do want. It is the most interesting and important part of your application logic. You want it up front and centre for all to see.

I think we all understand the human desire to want to believe that bad things won't happen, but when one becomes an engineer they have to set those emotions aside and realize that bad things will happen and that your job is to make sure that when bad things do happen that the failsafes achieve an acceptable outcome.

> I'm not sure what the better way to do it is tbh.

I'm not sure any better is fundamentally possible within an engineering context. The vast majority of the job is in understanding the failure modes and being able to communicate to the computer how to gracefully deal with the problems when they occur. As such, it stands to reason that the vast majority of the code is going to be related to errors.

If you are programming for hobby/learning purposes, where when bad things happen your program can simply crash with no consequence, there are different approaches that work well, but Go is decidedly not designed for this space. And, frankly, doesn't need to be as there are already plenty of languages designed for that. Go is, quite explicitly, meant to be an engineering language.

And the worst part is when reading the code in such a situation, it can get very tricky to figure out exactly where the exception is thrown.

There's a reason that the JVM ecosystem has largely moved away from checked exceptions.