The story of Max, a real programmer

> The reason the Go code is so much bigger is because it checks and (kind of) handles errors everywhere (?) they could occur

I’ve said before and will say again: error handling is most of what’s hard about programming (certainly most of what’s hard about distributed systems).

I keep looking for a programming language that makes error handling a central part of the design (rather than focusing on non-error control flow of various kinds), but honestly I don’t even know what would be better than the current options (Java/Python’s exceptions, or Go’s multiple returns, or Rust’s similar-seeming Result<T, E>). I know Linus likes using goto for errors (though I think it just kind of looks like try/catch in C) but I don’t know of much else.

It would need to be the case that code that doesn’t want to handle errors (like Max’s simple website) doesn’t have any error handling code, but it’s easy to add, and common patterns (e.g. “retry this inner operation N times, maybe with back off and jitter, and then fail this outer operation, either exiting the program or leaving unaffected parts running”) are easy to express

Abstracting error checking pays huge dividends, then. In PHP, if something crashes, it continues running and outputs nonsense (probably alright for the simplest of sites but you should turn this off if your thing has any kind of authentication) or it stops processing the page. PHP implicitly runs one process per request (not necessarily an OS process); everything is scoped to the request, and if the request fails it can just release every resource scoped to the request, and continue on. You could do the same in a CGI script by calling exit or abort. With any platform that handles all concurrent requests in a single process, you have to explicitly clean up a bunch of stuff, flush and close the response, and so on.

There's a similar effect in transactional databases - or transactional anything. If you run into any problem, you just abort the transaction and you don't have to care about individual cleanup steps.