I'm not sure I understand why this is true for Go rather than a statically typed FP language. If anything, I'd consider languages like Haskell or ML to be better at this.
- The obvious case is handling `nil`. In Haskell, you'd treat this as `Maybe a`, and it's obvious that you're not handling the nil case since the pattern match is incomplete. In Go, you get a nil pointer exception at runtime. You could check for the nil case for every pointer, but that's too onerous, so now you're left with relying on the programmer on checking
- Go doesn't have exceptions, which removes some of the hiding of bad code (see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050114-00/?p=36...), but you can still accidentally use a result when an error is return (in fact, you have to return something!). In Haskell, you're forced to pattern match on an `Either`, which again exposes bad through an incomplete pattern match.
I don't think these are arguments for FP per se, but I do think that statically typed FP languages (and the languages they inspire) are much better about removing footguns and making bad code hard to write, simply because the typechecker is so restrictive. As a more general principle, instead of making bad code screamingly obvious, make it impossible to write!
Now, you mention later in the thread that you've already used Haskell before, so you're probably aware of all this and I may misinterpreted what you meant. Did you mean a different form of bad code?
I'm not sure I understand why this is true for Go rather than a statically typed FP language. If anything, I'd consider languages like Haskell or ML to be better at this.
- The obvious case is handling `nil`. In Haskell, you'd treat this as `Maybe a`, and it's obvious that you're not handling the nil case since the pattern match is incomplete. In Go, you get a nil pointer exception at runtime. You could check for the nil case for every pointer, but that's too onerous, so now you're left with relying on the programmer on checking
- Go doesn't have exceptions, which removes some of the hiding of bad code (see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050114-00/?p=36...), but you can still accidentally use a result when an error is return (in fact, you have to return something!). In Haskell, you're forced to pattern match on an `Either`, which again exposes bad through an incomplete pattern match.
I don't think these are arguments for FP per se, but I do think that statically typed FP languages (and the languages they inspire) are much better about removing footguns and making bad code hard to write, simply because the typechecker is so restrictive. As a more general principle, instead of making bad code screamingly obvious, make it impossible to write!
Now, you mention later in the thread that you've already used Haskell before, so you're probably aware of all this and I may misinterpreted what you meant. Did you mean a different form of bad code?