If only there was some way the compiler could detect unused variable declarations, and may be emit some sort of “warning”, which would be sort of like an “error”, but wouldn’t cause the build to fail, and could be treated as an error in CI pipelines
ennemi [he/him]
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Cake day: December 29th, 2022
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The language was designed to be as simple as possible, as to not confuse the developers at Google. I know this sounds like something I made up in bad faith, but it’s really not.
The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike
"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical. – Rob Pike
The infamous
if err != nilblocks are a consequence of building the language around tuples (as opposed to, say, sum types like in Rust) and treating errors as values like in C. Rob Pike attempts to explain why it’s not a big deal here.
You can, if you want, opt into warnings causing your build to fail. This is commonly done in larger projects. If your merge request builds with warnings, it does not get merged.
In other words, it’s not a bad idea to want to flag unused variables and prevent them from ending up in source control. It’s a bad idea for the compiler to also pretend it’s a linter, and for this behaviour to be forced on, which ironically breaks the Unix philosophy principle of doing one thing and doing it well.
Mind you, this is an extremely minor pain point, but frankly this is like most Go design choices wherein the idea isn’t bad, but there exists a much better way to solve the problem.