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Comment by azth | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that there is no way to ensure immutability when passing messages in channels, and the language doesn't help you there. This is a recipe for race conditions.

Furthermore, you can easily have hierarchies of "goroutines", everything has to be painstakingly built from scratch and is very error prone.

> Another aspect of Go being a useful programming environment is having well-defined semantics for the most common programming mistakes, ... Quoting Tony Hoare

One of the most common programming mistakes of all, dubbed by Hoare himself as the "billion dollar mistake": null pointers, yet it was put into go without any consideration.

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> One of the most common programming mistakes of all, dubbed by Hoare himself as the "billion dollar mistake": null pointers, yet it was put into go without any consideration.

I get the distinct impression that people who invoke this boilerplate Hoare quote argument don't understand that null pointer bugs are "a billion dollar mistake" because nullable pointers have been idiomatic in every major programming language for the last 40+ years, not because they are individually particularly expensive.

Yeah, Rust-like enums would probably be strictly better than null pointers, but people talk about null pointers like they are going to doom your project when in reality they're mere papercuts--a small subset of all type errors--and there are whole projects that are written in fully dynamically typed languages! Indeed, there are worse problems than type errors in a language--you could have an impoverished ecosystem, poor tools (especially build tools), or abysmal performance, and many of the most popular programming languages have two of the three and null pointers. Go is fortunate to have only null pointers (papercuts) working against it.

I've never bothered to look up the hoare thing, but null as a member of all types increases the amount of time spent studying any given API (and of course, there are lots of null pointer bugs from people who didn't bother to study the API sufficiently).

Yeah, as previously mentioned, I fully agree that nullable pointers kind of suck and exhaustive pattern matching on enums is strictly better. I'm taking issue narrowly with abusing the "billion dollar mistake" quote to exaggerate the severity of the problem.

It's a big problem in Java at least. In Go you have value types by default and they try to make zero a meaningful value.

It's not a big problem when you look at the problems that plague even the most popular programming languages. At this point I can only refer you to my previous posts because I'm repeating myself. :)

Which problems do Java and C# have that golang doesn't? Incidentally, both of them have solutions to the billion dollar mistake, which golang doesn't.

Which is arguably even worse, because it goes on undetected and the code ends up producing incorrect results silently.

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