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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

But Go is not that readable. In fact across all languages I know I would factor go towards the bottom end of readability. Mostly because of it's insane error handling overhead. A lot of function bodies are like reading a book where every sentence is followed with 3 that have no meaning.

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That's subjective. Readability is one of Go's goals. Whether they achieved it depends on your preference.

The fact that goland automatically collapses error handling blocks is solid evidence that enough developers find go's error handling blocks to be invasive.

I agree. My point is that you can't objectively define readibility, so it will always be a matter of preference. I've met my share of Go developers that think it is very readable. I personally can't stand it.

You don't understand 'readability' the same as the language creators. More text to read doesn't necessarily make a file or function less readable. Quite the opposite usually.

IntelliJ collapses the repeatedly occurring err != nil blocks with expandable placeholders in grey color to aid readability. Not the ultimate evidence but says something when a commercial product spends effort behind such features.

Not necessarily no. It's a balance. And Go skews so far that it's no longer reasonable. It's so bad that the most popular Go IDE by default removes the error handling code from view.

I don’t know, I understand most assembly line I see in isolation, yet often have no idea what the whole does. Sometimes too primitive primitives actually hinder readability/understanding.

I know many don’t feel that way, but functional stream manipulation is a very good example for that — I much rather deal with filter.map.reduce whatever, than 3 nested for loops with random breaks inside, even though the latter may be easier to reason about line-by-line

That’s a myth. Go read some random Go. Trivial functions often do nothing but call a couple of other functions, check errors and return. But non-trivial functions use relatively less lines for error handling.

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