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0 pointsrandomdata2y ago0 comments

That is incorrect. Idiomatic Go is abundantly clear that values must always be useful, even if all you have is the default value. Thus T must be useful regardless of the state of error, and vice versa. As such, they are free to be observed independently. That does not mean T and error cannot be in a relationship, but they are not dependents.

There being a relationship between T and error is common, but observance of error is only significant when the error is relevant. Quite often it is, but not always, and in the latter case you can, assuming the code is idiomatic, safely use T and ignore error. T must be useful, after all.

It may be possible to create a scenario where T is not useful when error is not nil if you really want to screw with people, but that code would decidedly not be idiomatic. Indeed, there is always some way to screw with people if you try hard enough, but that's really beyond this discussion.

The use of the Either monad here is trying to cover a dependency which doesn't exist.

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awused2y ago

This is nonsense. This isn't about idiomatic Go or not, there is only one way to do things in Go, so a function doing things in that one way doesn't communicate anything to the caller. If you try to open a file, and the file doesn't exist, you have to return a useless nil pointer alongside the error and there is no way to magic up a "useful" T. Usually err != nil means T == nil, so trying to blindly use T assuming it's "useful" will panic and crash your program.

The idiomatic Go way to work around this is to write comments saying "sometimes T is non-nil even if err is non-nil, you need to handle this" and hoping your callers read your comments.

Funnily enough, your philosophy is far more true in a language with proper sum types. In Haskell/Ocaml/Rust, returning a tuple of (T, error) does mean that both T and error should both be "useful", because if they weren't the function would have chosen to return one or the other but not both. You're reading meaning into Go code where meaning can't be present, because there's no choice to be made, and ignoring languages where you actually can have the semantics you want Go to have.

randomdataOP2y ago

> you have to return a useless nil pointer

nil is useful. Notably, you can derive meaning from its nil-ness. If you try to open a file and it doesn't exist, returning a nil handle is quite reasonable, and one can check for the existence of that handle without needing consider the error.

If, say, you returned an invalid file descriptor when the file could not be opened, conceivably that could make the handle useless, but that would not be idiomatic. That would just be a terrible API design and unkind to the users of your API.

> Funnily enough, your philosophy is far more true in a language with proper sum types.

Of course. But not the Either monad specifically, as its intent is to communicate a dependence between two variables. That can be useful in some languages where variable dependence is a convention, but that is not applicable to idiomatic Go.

Frankly, the only thing funny here is the idea that it is useful to reply to a thread before reading it. Let me reiterate: Either is not a suitable representation of (T, error). They have very different semantics. There are data structures which can serve as a suitable representation of (T, error), but Either is not it.

awused2y ago

>Most notably, you can derive meaning from its nil-ness.

This is sophistry. If I try to "use" a nil pointer I get a crash. I have to carefully check that it's non-null even if error is null. You can "derive" the same "meaning" from Result[T, error] being an error instead of a T. You can "derive" the same "meaning" from Option[T] being empty. There is no special meaning that a null file gives me that I can't take from a Result containing an error.

There isn't some big philosophical difference that Go is taking a principled stance on, just a practical one: with those you get type safety, and if you do it wrong you get a compilation error. In the Go way if you do it wrong you get a runtime panic.

>that would not be idiomatic. That would just be a terrible API design and unkind to the users of your API.

That is the vast majority of the stdlib and the vast majority of all popular Go libraries. If idiomatic Go code is code where (T, error) means T is always a useful value even if error is non-nil, then there is vanishingly little idiomatic Go code in existence.

>as its intent is to create a dependence between two variables.

This is nonsense. To use your personal specific terminology, Either encodes a dependence between variables that already exists, it doesn't create it. That dependence exists in Go too, Go isn't a language where the fundamentals of programming change, it's the same in C where people write methods that take both a result and an error pointer.

Either is an option to use when there is a dependence. If there isn't a dependence, and both are always present, you can and should return (T, error) and not Either[T, error]. No one is trying to force Go to always use Either when (T,error) would be appropriate, just like you are not forced to in other languages. You just have choices in those languages you do not have in Go, and overwhelmingly people choose more appropriate types than (T, error) when given the choice.

responding to your edit: >Either is not a suitable representation of (T, error). They have very different semantics. There are data structures which can serve as a suitable representation of (T, error), but Either is not it.

It's odd that you acknowledge this, but then claim that I somehow claimed the opposite. Perhaps you should follow your own advice about reading. Either represents a subset of the four cases that (T, error) covers, and even in Go the two cases that Either covers are the only ones in the vast majority of usage. In Go, most, but not all (and no one is claiming all), uses of (T, error) would be better expressed as Either[T, error].

In fact, the different semantics is the entire point. The point is not to keep the semantics the same but change up the syntax. In Go (T, error) is used commonly, in idiomatic Go unless the stdlib is unidiomatic, to emulate the semantics of Either[T, error]. If (T, error) doesn't have the right semantics for your program - and rarely are all four cases considered - then a more appropriate type with matching semantics should be used instead.

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awused2y ago

The idiomatic Go way to work around this is to write comments saying "sometimes T is non-nil even if err is non-nil, you need to handle this" and hoping your callers read your comments.

randomdataOP2y ago

> you have to return a useless nil pointer

> Funnily enough, your philosophy is far more true in a language with proper sum types.

awused2y ago

>Most notably, you can derive meaning from its nil-ness.

>that would not be idiomatic. That would just be a terrible API design and unkind to the users of your API.

>as its intent is to create a dependence between two variables.

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