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I went into this article expecting to agree with part of it. I came away agreeing with all of it. And I want to point out that Go also shares some of these catastrophic data decisions (automatic struct zero values that silently do the wrong thing by default).

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We got bit by a default value in a DMS task where the target column didn't exist so the data wasn't replicated and the default value was "this work needs to be done."

This is not pb nor go. A sensible default of invalid state would have caught this. So would an error and crash. Either would have been better than corrupt data.

You mean aws dms insterted the string literal “this work needs to be done” into your db?

So, that target column was called the wrong name, meaning data intended for the column never arrived, causing the default value in the database to be used, which was an integer that mapped to "this work item needs to be processed still" which led to double processing the record post dms migration

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