As your future colleague wondering what the hell that variable is for, thanks Go.
I prefer for it to be just a warning so I can debug without trouble, the build system will just prevent me from completing the pull request with it (and any other warning).
Changing it will bring down the entire system.
We've spent ten million dollars and do not know why.
Isnt the syntax highlighting it as mever used?
So why would they wonder?
If it is a pure value, I'd assume yes, but if it is tied to a side effect (E.g. write its value to a file), then it would be not used but still could break your app if removed.
I'm not familiar with rust language specifically, but generally that's what could happen
A quick "find all references" will point out it's not used and can be deleted if it accidentally gets checked in but ideally, you have systems in place to not let it get checked into the main branch in the first place.
Yeah that should be looked for in a CI line check, not a compilation requirement
You mean a system like the compiler
Or a linter. Or code reviews. Or anything else. The nice thing is that if the compiler doesn't demand something, it can be given to the engineer as an option. The compiler should have the option to do it. The option could even be defaulted on. Afaik there is no way in Golang to disable that error (this is the line that does it: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/04fb929a5b7991ed0945d05ab8015c1721958d82/src/go/types/stmt.go#L67-L69). like --no-pedantics or such. Golang's compiler openly refuses to give engineers more choices in what they think is the best system to handle it.
Who needs an option to leave unused variables around the code base? Lazybones?
You've literally never commented out a line or two but left the variable declaration while debugging?
If only there was some way the compiler could detect unused variable declarations, and may be emit some sort of "warning", which would be sort of like an "error", but wouldn't cause the build to fail, and could be treated as an error in CI pipelines
Let's not pretend people acknowledge warnings, though. It's a popular meme that projects will have hundreds of warnings and that devs will ignore them all.
There's a perfectly valid use case for opinionated languages that don't let you get away with that. It's also similar to how go has gofmt to enforce a consistent formatting.
Honestly, I've been using Go for years and this unused variable error rarely comes up. When it does, it's trivial to resolve. But the error has saved me from bugs more often than it has wasted my time. Most commonly when you declare a new variable in a narrower scope when you intended to assign to the variable of the same name (since Go has separate declare vs assign operators).
You can, if you want, opt into warnings causing your build to fail. This is commonly done in larger projects. If your merge request builds with warnings, it does not get merged.
In other words, it's not a bad idea to want to flag unused variables and prevent them from ending up in source control. It's a bad idea for the compiler to also pretend it's a linter, and for this behaviour to be forced on, which ironically breaks the Unix philosophy principle of doing one thing and doing it well.
Mind you, this is an extremely minor pain point, but frankly this is like most Go design choices wherein the idea isn't bad, but there exists a much better way to solve the problem.
Some people simply ignore warnings, that's the main issue. Trust me, I saw this way too often.
If you cannot compile it than you have to fix it, otherwise just mark unused variables as 'not an error' via _ = someunusedvar.
Go is not a programming language. It's an angry rant of a bored Google engineer.
IDK, Brainfuck is still classified as a programming language and Go is not that far behind it.
Sometimes I think Go was specifically made for Google to dictate its own preferences on the rest of us like some kind of power play. It enforces one single style of programming too much.
From what I've heard from Google employees Google is really stringent with their coding standards and they usually limit what you can do with the language. Like for C++ they don't even use half the fancy features C++ offers you because it's hard to reason about them.
I guess that policy makes sense but I feel like it takes out all the fun out of the job.
As far as C++ goes, that's probably the only sane way to use the language.
Just about any place I know that uses C++ also does that with C++ so that's nothing unusual for C++ specifically. It's too big of a language to reason about very well if you don't, so you've gotta find a subset that works.
Too many patterns. If you do not do this every author will have a different use of the language and you will have to read a book of documentation each time you change files.
Is this a hard error? Like it doesn't compile at all?
Isn't there something like #[allow(unused)] in Rust you can put over the declaration?
Yes it is a hard error and Go does not compile then. You can do _ = foobar to fake variable usage. I think this is okay for testing purposes.
I think that's even worse because it increases the likelihood you'll forget you faked that variable just for testing
Worse than not having a unused variable check at all? Dunno, the underscore assignment are very visible for me and stand out on every code read and review.
Yes, worse, because now if you want to use the underscore assignment to indicate that you really want to discard that variable - it gets confused with underscore assignments that were put there "temporarily" for experimentation purpose.
Exactly.
Say I'm having some issue with a function. I comment out half the function to see if that's where the weirdness is. Golang says "unused variable, I refuse to compile this dogshit!" I completely fool Golang by just using _ = foo. Yes, I was correct, that's where the problem was. I rewrite that section of the code, and test it out, things work perfectly. Only now, it turns out I'm not using foo anymore, and Golang has no idea because I so cleverly fooled it with _ = foo.
Now, something that could be caught by a linter and expressed as a warning is missed by the language police entirely, and may make it into production code.
Police the code that people put into a repository / share with others. Don't police the code that people just want to test on their own.
Ew, that's awful. Go is not one of my programming languages but I had always held it in high esteem because Ken Thompson and Rob Pike were involved in it.
That's the main reason it has had any success. It's not that it's a good language, it's just that it has good references.
Honestly, it does not happen often that I have a ln unused variable that I want to keep. In my mind it is the same thing when wanting to call a function that does not exists. Also my editor is highlighting error Long before I try to compile, so this is fine too for me.
The underscore is used in production code too. It's a legitimate way to tell the compiler to discard the object because you don't intend to use the pointer/value.
Never really coded in Go outside of trying it out, but as far as I know it's a hard error.
I think this is a good thing. The styles are just opinions anyway and forcing everyone to just follow a single style takes a lot of bikeshedding away, which I really like.
Also Go: exceptions aren't real, you declare and handle every error at every level or declare that you might return that error because go fuck yourself.
Because that's sane and readable?
Wow. I'm honestly surprised I'm getting downvotes for a joke. Also, no. It isn't. It really isn't.
It is better than in most languages with exceptions, except from languages like Java, that require you to declare that certain method throws certain error.
It's more tedious in Go, but at the end of the day it's the same thing.
When I use someone else's code I want to be sure if that thing can throw an error so I can decide what to do with it.
Java doesn't have to declare every error at every level... Go is significantly more tedious and verbose than any other common language (for errors). I found it leads to less specific errors and errors handled at weird levels in the stack.
You know it’s social media when the one that’s right is downvoted
It's better than "invisible" exceptions, but it's still the worst "better" version. The best solution is some version of the good old Result monad. Rust has the BEST error handling (at least in the languages i know). You must handle Errors, BUT they are just values, AND there's a easy, non-verbose way of passing on the error (the ? operator).
Beyond a quick "hello world" when it came out, I've never used rust, but that sounds pretty great
I'm with you, exceptions sound good but are a bug factory.
There's nothing sane and readable about how Go insists you format dates and time. It is one of the dumbest language features I've ever seen.
If this language feature is annoying to you, you are the problem. You 👏are 👏 the 👏 reason 👏 it 👏 exists.
I worked in places where the developers loaded their code full of unused variables and dead code. It costs a lot of time reasoning about it during pull request and it costs a lot of time arguing with coworkers who swear that they’re going to need that code in there next week (they never need that code).
This is a very attractive feature for a programming language in my opinion.
PS: I’m still denying your pull request if you try to comment the code instead.
❗️EDIT: A lot of y’all have never been to programming hell and it shows. 🪖 I’m telling you, I’ve fixed bayonets in the trenches of dynamically typed Python, I’ve braved the rice paddies of CICD YAML mines, I’ve queried alongside SQL Team Six; I’ve seen things in production, things you’ll probably never see… things you should never see. It’s easy to be against an opinionated compiler having such a feature, but when you watch a prod deployment blow up on a Friday afternoon without an easy option to rollback AND hours later you find the bug after you were stalled by dead code, it changes you. Then… then you start to appreciate opinionated features like this one. 🫡
That's 👏 what 👏 CI 👏 is 👏 for
Warn in dev, enforce stuff like this in CI and block PRs that don't pass. Go is just being silly here, which is not surprising given that Rob Pike said
Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic numerals.
The Go developers need to get over themselves.
Yeah, insisting on things like a variable being used will result in people using work arounds. It won't result in people not doing it.
Then, because people trust the language to police this rule, the work-arounds and debug code will get committed.
func main() {
test := true
}
Oops, golang doesn't like that.
func main() {
test := true
_ = test
}
Perfectly cromulent code.
If they really wanted to avoid people having unused variables, they should have used a naming convention. Any variable not prefixed by "_" or "_debug_" or whatever has to be used, for example. Then block any code being checked in that still contains those markers.
reading my code after being up for 18 hours and having my eyes glaze over trying to parse the structure of my monochromatic code but then I remember Rob Pike said syntax highlighting is juvenile so I throw my head against that wall for another 3 hours
Prescription glasses are juvenile. When I was a child, I was prescribed visual aid to help my nearsightedness. I grew up and today I raw-dog the road.
I agree that golang is being dumb when you don't even have the option to tell it that this is a testing env or something. But the thing about syntax highlighting is not the same. One is about handholding the developer so much that it makes it even more difficult to develop, and the other is a completely optional feature that is so uselful and non intrusive that even wizardly editors like emacs use it.
What's a situation where you need an unused variable? I'm onboard with go and goland being a bit aggressive with this type of thing, but I can't think of the case where I need to be able to commit an unused variable.
You probably wouldn't be committing this, unless you're backing up a heavily WIP branch. The issue is that if you're developing locally and need to make a temporary change, you might comment something out, which then requires commenting another now-unused variable, which then requires commenting out yet another variable, and so on. Go isn't helping you here, it's wasting your time for no good reason. Just emit a warning and allow CI to be configured to reject warnings.
I will need it two minutes tops. If I don't use it by then, I'll delete it, especially if it gives a warning like Rust does. But this? It just gets in the way.
Have you looked at the post? Use case: you are testing something or playing around and you want to try something. That's supper common
I have a use case in Powershell: my company has a number of scripts that are minimally but importantly customized per-location, and I have an otherwise unused "SiteId" variable where I keep the location name for that specific script for a quick sanity check when I'm looking them over for any reason. Not necessary, but useful to me. Probably wouldn't do the same thing in a compiled program, but I can at least see where someone might want something similar.
That's a problem with your workplace, not the language nor OP.
You could have a build setting for personal development where unused variables are not checked, and then a build setting for your CI system that will look for them. It gives you freedom to develop the way you want without being annoyed when you remove something just to test something, but will not merge your PR unless the stricter rules are met.
I concur, it is a problem with that workplace. (In this case, OP is just sharing a funny meme. I wouldn’t suggest this meme means they’re a problem. I could have made this meme and I love the feature.)
Developing on a team at a company is like the “Wild West.” What’s considered to be acceptable will not only vary from workplace to workplace, but it can also fluctuate as developers and managers come and Go. Each of them have their own unique personality with their own outlook on what “quality” code looks like. (And many of them do not care about code quality whatsoever. They just need to survive 1-2 years there, make management happy with speedy deliveries, and then they can move on to the next company with a 30% pay bump.)
Having experienced working with developers who frequently filled with code base with unused code while having no control over who will leave or join as a contributor to the code base, I think features like this make for a more sane development experience when you’re developing with a team of seemingly random people that you never personally invited to contribute to the code base.
will not merge your PR unless the stricter rules are met.
This doesn’t fly when you work in big corporate and the boss doesn’t care about the code meeting stricter rules. “A working prototype? No it’s not- that’s an MVP!Deploy it to production now and move onto the next project!”
Why in the world would you want to develop something that doesn't follow the coding rules required by your org, just so you can go back and fix everything before submitting a PR? That's just extra work.
Because you want to know if the first half of the code works at all before you write the whole second half.
Finding all the bits that will be used by the second half and changing the declarations to just expressions is a bunch of extra work. As is adding placeholder code to use the declared variables.
I'm having a hard time envisioning a situation where testing my code requires a bunch of unused variables. Just don't declare the variables until you've started writing the code that uses them...
Most of the time you don't write the code, you change it.
I had tons of situations where I wanted to test deleting a code block which just happened to use an imported library, which the compiler is now complaining about because it's no longer being used.
If that’s the problem, then I would just use something like goimports to auto fix the imports every time I hit save. I never even see those errors so they don’t bother me.
That's what warnings are for. The jokes about programmers ignoring warnings are outdated - we live in an age where CIs run linters and style checkers on pull requests, there is no reason for a CI to not automatically reject code that builds with warnings.
I mean, yeah that kind of stuff absolutely should not be in production. However, it's easy to see how it could be annoying while testing something while working on it. It being annoying doesn't make it a bad feature, just as finding it annoying doesn't make you a problem imo.
It is VERY annoying when you're hunting for a bug. For example, when you comment out a function call to debug an issue, the compiler might suddenly complains about unused variables, so you'll need to comment them out as well. Repeat several times and you'll start having an urge to smack the monitor.
Lol new copypasta unlocked 🔓
🫡
It costs a lot of time reasoning about it during pull request and it costs a lot of time arguing with coworkers who swear that they’re going to need that code in there next week (they never need that code).
You should go to your team leader and ask them to enforce a coding standard. I agree with other commenters that said this should be a warning instead of an error.
I was working for a team that did quality control on the code of an entire financial group and it's still amazing to me the shit we let through.
I feel annoyed even having compiler warnings in my code and here we were downgrading errors into warnings so the code would go through, or adding rules exceptions for a program so the team responsible could push a hotfix to prod...
It's all shit. All the way down.
I dream of working with such a strict language.
I'll start calling SQL "squeal" now in the spirit of this comment
No amount of propaganda will ever get me to pronounce it "sequel". I'll die in that hill.
Wait… how do you say it? es queue el?
I do, unashamedly.
And I fucking love it. Thank you Go!
lol what's wrong with you
"Other people" are what's wrong with me. People don't use linters/formatters/type annotations when it's optional and produce dogshite code as a result. Having the compiler itself enforce some level of human decency is a godsend.
sure but unused variables are no biggie
You go Go!
lints that underline unused vars as errors, and not notes or warns are the worst lints..
OP never said he/she commits such code but wants to iterate, test, explore.
Of course, unused var should not be part of a commit.
This makes me not want to use Golang at all.
I assure you, the feeling is mutual.
You have to manually provide a seed every time you want a random number. Gophers will defend this with their dying breath.
This is not needed anymore since version 1.20
That's good to hear, but I wouldn't choose to use a language that took 5 years to get that right, when most languages have it from day 1.
So what language would you chose then? Java, PHP, JavaScript? None of the big languages where perfect from day one and it does not really matter, since day one is over already.
Yes, but I'd prefer incompetence rather than being deliberately anti-developer.
Okayyyy
you can assign it to itself and it’ll be just fine. can’t put a breakpoint right on it, but it works
I hate this in C++ when it does this with parameters of an overidden function. I don't need that specific parameter, but if I omit the variable name, I reduce readability.
[[maybe_unused]]
Which is have been able to use since we switched to C++17 ... a couple of months ago.
The best part of these threads is no matter what someone comments, at least 2 people will reply either correcting or "clarifying" the original commenter.
Lol
Comment the unused variable out and no security hole gets accidentally shipped.
Me when my wife wants to buy new clothes (her clothes are the variables)
Isn't it the same with ESLint 6 (JavaScript/ES6)?
You're confusing it with your linter. Java script don't care.
That's why I said ESLint
It's a Linter for JavaScript. Some people might not know what ESLint is that's why I put it in brackets
Depends on your eslint config, but yeah that's an option.
I don't believe so.
Are you sure?
(this is my work pc so wayyy to much work to make a screenshot and upload it)
That's from ESLint, not javascript itself. JS doesn't care about unused variables
JS simply does not care.
That's why I said ESLint
ESLint won't prevent you from running your code, which is what the OP is on about. Hence the confusion in this thread.
Oh it will. At least in combination with Vue. At least that's the default. Of cause you can disable it.
You're describing many things that are not JavaScript the language. If you create and use tools that will stop you then yes they will stop you.
I said ESLint. Not Javascript. ESLint is a linter for JavaScript. That's why I put JavaScript in brackets. Some people don't know what ESLint is. I'm talking about ESLint the whole time. Its not JavaScript specific but it's mostly used for JavaScript
You yourself are talking about ESLint. You said that ESLint won't prevent me from creating unused variables and functions when it clearly does. It won't even run and throw an error
Edit: ohh it's a Lemmy bug. The comment didn't update yet. Originally I said "ES6" then I changed it to "JavaScript" and then I changed it to "ESLint (JavaScript)"
There's a load of confusion in this thread.
What the post is about is compiler based clean code enforcement. JS doesn't do this, but your editor in combination with ESLint prevents you from running the program. However this isn't a general JS thing, just the way your setup works.
Just saw your edit, and yeah, that makes sense as to the confusion.
Either way, your comment enquired as to whether it was "the same" and it still isn't because for Go it's a language feature and ESLint is not a language, it just allows you to create similar behaviour for JavaSvript which, by default, does not exhibit that behaviour.
As your future colleague wondering what the hell that variable is for, thanks Go.
I prefer for it to be just a warning so I can debug without trouble, the build system will just prevent me from completing the pull request with it (and any other warning).
Changing it will bring down the entire system.
We've spent ten million dollars and do not know why.
Isnt the syntax highlighting it as mever used?
So why would they wonder?
If it is a pure value, I'd assume yes, but if it is tied to a side effect (E.g. write its value to a file), then it would be not used but still could break your app if removed.
I'm not familiar with rust language specifically, but generally that's what could happen
A quick "find all references" will point out it's not used and can be deleted if it accidentally gets checked in but ideally, you have systems in place to not let it get checked into the main branch in the first place.
Yeah that should be looked for in a CI line check, not a compilation requirement
You mean a system like the compiler
Or a linter. Or code reviews. Or anything else. The nice thing is that if the compiler doesn't demand something, it can be given to the engineer as an option. The compiler should have the option to do it. The option could even be defaulted on. Afaik there is no way in Golang to disable that error (this is the line that does it: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/04fb929a5b7991ed0945d05ab8015c1721958d82/src/go/types/stmt.go#L67-L69). like --no-pedantics or such. Golang's compiler openly refuses to give engineers more choices in what they think is the best system to handle it.
Who needs an option to leave unused variables around the code base? Lazybones?
You've literally never commented out a line or two but left the variable declaration while debugging?
If only there was some way the compiler could detect unused variable declarations, and may be emit some sort of "warning", which would be sort of like an "error", but wouldn't cause the build to fail, and could be treated as an error in CI pipelines
Let's not pretend people acknowledge warnings, though. It's a popular meme that projects will have hundreds of warnings and that devs will ignore them all.
There's a perfectly valid use case for opinionated languages that don't let you get away with that. It's also similar to how go has gofmt to enforce a consistent formatting.
Honestly, I've been using Go for years and this unused variable error rarely comes up. When it does, it's trivial to resolve. But the error has saved me from bugs more often than it has wasted my time. Most commonly when you declare a new variable in a narrower scope when you intended to assign to the variable of the same name (since Go has separate declare vs assign operators).
You can, if you want, opt into warnings causing your build to fail. This is commonly done in larger projects. If your merge request builds with warnings, it does not get merged.
In other words, it's not a bad idea to want to flag unused variables and prevent them from ending up in source control. It's a bad idea for the compiler to also pretend it's a linter, and for this behaviour to be forced on, which ironically breaks the Unix philosophy principle of doing one thing and doing it well.
Mind you, this is an extremely minor pain point, but frankly this is like most Go design choices wherein the idea isn't bad, but there exists a much better way to solve the problem.
Some people simply ignore warnings, that's the main issue. Trust me, I saw this way too often.
If you cannot compile it than you have to fix it, otherwise just mark unused variables as 'not an error' via
_ = someunusedvar.Go is not a programming language. It's an angry rant of a bored Google engineer.
IDK, Brainfuck is still classified as a programming language and Go is not that far behind it.
Sometimes I think Go was specifically made for Google to dictate its own preferences on the rest of us like some kind of power play. It enforces one single style of programming too much.
From what I've heard from Google employees Google is really stringent with their coding standards and they usually limit what you can do with the language. Like for C++ they don't even use half the fancy features C++ offers you because it's hard to reason about them.
I guess that policy makes sense but I feel like it takes out all the fun out of the job.
As far as C++ goes, that's probably the only sane way to use the language.
Just about any place I know that uses C++ also does that with C++ so that's nothing unusual for C++ specifically. It's too big of a language to reason about very well if you don't, so you've gotta find a subset that works.
Too many patterns. If you do not do this every author will have a different use of the language and you will have to read a book of documentation each time you change files.
Is this a hard error? Like it doesn't compile at all?
Isn't there something like
#[allow(unused)]in Rust you can put over the declaration?Yes it is a hard error and Go does not compile then. You can do
_ = foobarto fake variable usage. I think this is okay for testing purposes.I think that's even worse because it increases the likelihood you'll forget you faked that variable just for testing
Worse than not having a unused variable check at all? Dunno, the underscore assignment are very visible for me and stand out on every code read and review.
Yes, worse, because now if you want to use the underscore assignment to indicate that you really want to discard that variable - it gets confused with underscore assignments that were put there "temporarily" for experimentation purpose.
Exactly.
Say I'm having some issue with a function. I comment out half the function to see if that's where the weirdness is. Golang says "unused variable, I refuse to compile this dogshit!" I completely fool Golang by just using
_ = foo. Yes, I was correct, that's where the problem was. I rewrite that section of the code, and test it out, things work perfectly. Only now, it turns out I'm not usingfooanymore, and Golang has no idea because I so cleverly fooled it with_ = foo.Now, something that could be caught by a linter and expressed as a warning is missed by the language police entirely, and may make it into production code.
Police the code that people put into a repository / share with others. Don't police the code that people just want to test on their own.
Ew, that's awful. Go is not one of my programming languages but I had always held it in high esteem because Ken Thompson and Rob Pike were involved in it.
That's the main reason it has had any success. It's not that it's a good language, it's just that it has good references.
Honestly, it does not happen often that I have a ln unused variable that I want to keep. In my mind it is the same thing when wanting to call a function that does not exists. Also my editor is highlighting error Long before I try to compile, so this is fine too for me.
The underscore is used in production code too. It's a legitimate way to tell the compiler to discard the object because you don't intend to use the pointer/value.
Never really coded in Go outside of trying it out, but as far as I know it's a hard error.
I think this is a good thing. The styles are just opinions anyway and forcing everyone to just follow a single style takes a lot of bikeshedding away, which I really like.
Also Go: exceptions aren't real, you declare and handle every error at every level or declare that you might return that error because go fuck yourself.
Because that's sane and readable?
Wow. I'm honestly surprised I'm getting downvotes for a joke. Also, no. It isn't. It really isn't.
It is better than in most languages with exceptions, except from languages like Java, that require you to declare that certain method throws certain error.
It's more tedious in Go, but at the end of the day it's the same thing.
When I use someone else's code I want to be sure if that thing can throw an error so I can decide what to do with it.
Java doesn't have to declare every error at every level... Go is significantly more tedious and verbose than any other common language (for errors). I found it leads to less specific errors and errors handled at weird levels in the stack.
You know it’s social media when the one that’s right is downvoted
It's better than "invisible" exceptions, but it's still the worst "better" version. The best solution is some version of the good old Result monad. Rust has the BEST error handling (at least in the languages i know). You must handle Errors, BUT they are just values, AND there's a easy, non-verbose way of passing on the error (the ? operator).
Beyond a quick "hello world" when it came out, I've never used rust, but that sounds pretty great
I'm with you, exceptions sound good but are a bug factory.
There's nothing sane and readable about how Go insists you format dates and time. It is one of the dumbest language features I've ever seen.
If this language feature is annoying to you, you are the problem. You 👏are 👏 the 👏 reason 👏 it 👏 exists.
I worked in places where the developers loaded their code full of unused variables and dead code. It costs a lot of time reasoning about it during pull request and it costs a lot of time arguing with coworkers who swear that they’re going to need that code in there next week (they never need that code).
This is a very attractive feature for a programming language in my opinion.
PS: I’m still denying your pull request if you try to comment the code instead.
❗️EDIT: A lot of y’all have never been to programming hell and it shows. 🪖 I’m telling you, I’ve fixed bayonets in the trenches of dynamically typed Python, I’ve braved the rice paddies of CICD YAML mines, I’ve queried alongside SQL Team Six; I’ve seen things in production, things you’ll probably never see… things you should never see. It’s easy to be against an opinionated compiler having such a feature, but when you watch a prod deployment blow up on a Friday afternoon without an easy option to rollback AND hours later you find the bug after you were stalled by dead code, it changes you. Then… then you start to appreciate opinionated features like this one. 🫡
That's 👏 what 👏 CI 👏 is 👏 for
Warn in dev, enforce stuff like this in CI and block PRs that don't pass. Go is just being silly here, which is not surprising given that Rob Pike said
The Go developers need to get over themselves.
Yeah, insisting on things like a variable being used will result in people using work arounds. It won't result in people not doing it.
Then, because people trust the language to police this rule, the work-arounds and debug code will get committed.
Oops, golang doesn't like that.
Perfectly cromulent code.
If they really wanted to avoid people having unused variables, they should have used a naming convention. Any variable not prefixed by "_" or "_debug_" or whatever has to be used, for example. Then block any code being checked in that still contains those markers.
reading my code after being up for 18 hours and having my eyes glaze over trying to parse the structure of my monochromatic code but then I remember Rob Pike said syntax highlighting is juvenile so I throw my head against that wall for another 3 hours
I agree that golang is being dumb when you don't even have the option to tell it that this is a testing env or something. But the thing about syntax highlighting is not the same. One is about handholding the developer so much that it makes it even more difficult to develop, and the other is a completely optional feature that is so uselful and non intrusive that even wizardly editors like emacs use it.
What's a situation where you need an unused variable? I'm onboard with go and goland being a bit aggressive with this type of thing, but I can't think of the case where I need to be able to commit an unused variable.
You probably wouldn't be committing this, unless you're backing up a heavily WIP branch. The issue is that if you're developing locally and need to make a temporary change, you might comment something out, which then requires commenting another now-unused variable, which then requires commenting out yet another variable, and so on. Go isn't helping you here, it's wasting your time for no good reason. Just emit a warning and allow CI to be configured to reject warnings.
I will need it two minutes tops. If I don't use it by then, I'll delete it, especially if it gives a warning like Rust does. But this? It just gets in the way.
Have you looked at the post? Use case: you are testing something or playing around and you want to try something. That's supper common
I have a use case in Powershell: my company has a number of scripts that are minimally but importantly customized per-location, and I have an otherwise unused "SiteId" variable where I keep the location name for that specific script for a quick sanity check when I'm looking them over for any reason. Not necessary, but useful to me. Probably wouldn't do the same thing in a compiled program, but I can at least see where someone might want something similar.
That's a problem with your workplace, not the language nor OP.
You could have a build setting for personal development where unused variables are not checked, and then a build setting for your CI system that will look for them. It gives you freedom to develop the way you want without being annoyed when you remove something just to test something, but will not merge your PR unless the stricter rules are met.
I concur, it is a problem with that workplace. (In this case, OP is just sharing a funny meme. I wouldn’t suggest this meme means they’re a problem. I could have made this meme and I love the feature.)
Developing on a team at a company is like the “Wild West.” What’s considered to be acceptable will not only vary from workplace to workplace, but it can also fluctuate as developers and managers come and Go. Each of them have their own unique personality with their own outlook on what “quality” code looks like. (And many of them do not care about code quality whatsoever. They just need to survive 1-2 years there, make management happy with speedy deliveries, and then they can move on to the next company with a 30% pay bump.)
Having experienced working with developers who frequently filled with code base with unused code while having no control over who will leave or join as a contributor to the code base, I think features like this make for a more sane development experience when you’re developing with a team of seemingly random people that you never personally invited to contribute to the code base.
This doesn’t fly when you work in big corporate and the boss doesn’t care about the code meeting stricter rules. “A working prototype? No it’s not- that’s an MVP! Deploy it to production now and move onto the next project!”
Why in the world would you want to develop something that doesn't follow the coding rules required by your org, just so you can go back and fix everything before submitting a PR? That's just extra work.
Because you want to know if the first half of the code works at all before you write the whole second half.
Finding all the bits that will be used by the second half and changing the declarations to just expressions is a bunch of extra work. As is adding placeholder code to use the declared variables.
I'm having a hard time envisioning a situation where testing my code requires a bunch of unused variables. Just don't declare the variables until you've started writing the code that uses them...
Most of the time you don't write the code, you change it.
I had tons of situations where I wanted to test deleting a code block which just happened to use an imported library, which the compiler is now complaining about because it's no longer being used.
If that’s the problem, then I would just use something like goimports to auto fix the imports every time I hit save. I never even see those errors so they don’t bother me.
That's what warnings are for. The jokes about programmers ignoring warnings are outdated - we live in an age where CIs run linters and style checkers on pull requests, there is no reason for a CI to not automatically reject code that builds with warnings.
I mean, yeah that kind of stuff absolutely should not be in production. However, it's easy to see how it could be annoying while testing something while working on it. It being annoying doesn't make it a bad feature, just as finding it annoying doesn't make you a problem imo.
It is VERY annoying when you're hunting for a bug. For example, when you comment out a function call to debug an issue, the compiler might suddenly complains about unused variables, so you'll need to comment them out as well. Repeat several times and you'll start having an urge to smack the monitor.
Lol new copypasta unlocked 🔓
🫡
You should go to your team leader and ask them to enforce a coding standard. I agree with other commenters that said this should be a warning instead of an error.
I was working for a team that did quality control on the code of an entire financial group and it's still amazing to me the shit we let through.
I feel annoyed even having compiler warnings in my code and here we were downgrading errors into warnings so the code would go through, or adding rules exceptions for a program so the team responsible could push a hotfix to prod... It's all shit. All the way down.
I dream of working with such a strict language.
I'll start calling SQL "squeal" now in the spirit of this comment
No amount of propaganda will ever get me to pronounce it "sequel". I'll die in that hill.
Wait… how do you say it? es queue el?
I do, unashamedly.
And I fucking love it. Thank you Go!
lol what's wrong with you
"Other people" are what's wrong with me. People don't use linters/formatters/type annotations when it's optional and produce dogshite code as a result. Having the compiler itself enforce some level of human decency is a godsend.
sure but unused variables are no biggie
You go Go!
lints that underline unused vars as errors, and not notes or warns are the worst lints..
OP never said he/she commits such code but wants to iterate, test, explore.
Of course, unused var should not be part of a commit.
This makes me not want to use Golang at all.
I assure you, the feeling is mutual.
You have to manually provide a seed every time you want a random number. Gophers will defend this with their dying breath.
This is not needed anymore since version 1.20
That's good to hear, but I wouldn't choose to use a language that took 5 years to get that right, when most languages have it from day 1.
So what language would you chose then? Java, PHP, JavaScript? None of the big languages where perfect from day one and it does not really matter, since day one is over already.
Yes, but I'd prefer incompetence rather than being deliberately anti-developer.
Okayyyy
you can assign it to itself and it’ll be just fine. can’t put a breakpoint right on it, but it works
I hate this in C++ when it does this with parameters of an overidden function. I don't need that specific parameter, but if I omit the variable name, I reduce readability.
[[maybe_unused]]
Which is have been able to use since we switched to C++17 ... a couple of months ago.
The best part of these threads is no matter what someone comments, at least 2 people will reply either correcting or "clarifying" the original commenter.
Lol
Comment the unused variable out and no security hole gets accidentally shipped.
Me when my wife wants to buy new clothes (her clothes are the variables)
Isn't it the same with ESLint 6 (JavaScript/ES6)?
You're confusing it with your linter. Java script don't care.
That's why I said ESLint
It's a Linter for JavaScript. Some people might not know what ESLint is that's why I put it in brackets
Depends on your eslint config, but yeah that's an option.
I don't believe so.
Are you sure?
(this is my work pc so wayyy to much work to make a screenshot and upload it)
That's from ESLint, not javascript itself. JS doesn't care about unused variables
JS simply does not care.
That's why I said ESLint
ESLint won't prevent you from running your code, which is what the OP is on about. Hence the confusion in this thread.
Oh it will. At least in combination with Vue. At least that's the default. Of cause you can disable it.
You're describing many things that are not JavaScript the language. If you create and use tools that will stop you then yes they will stop you.
I said ESLint. Not Javascript. ESLint is a linter for JavaScript. That's why I put JavaScript in brackets. Some people don't know what ESLint is. I'm talking about ESLint the whole time. Its not JavaScript specific but it's mostly used for JavaScript
You yourself are talking about ESLint. You said that ESLint won't prevent me from creating unused variables and functions when it clearly does. It won't even run and throw an error
Edit: ohh it's a Lemmy bug. The comment didn't update yet. Originally I said "ES6" then I changed it to "JavaScript" and then I changed it to "ESLint (JavaScript)"
There's a load of confusion in this thread.
What the post is about is compiler based clean code enforcement. JS doesn't do this, but your editor in combination with ESLint prevents you from running the program. However this isn't a general JS thing, just the way your setup works.
Just saw your edit, and yeah, that makes sense as to the confusion.
Either way, your comment enquired as to whether it was "the same" and it still isn't because for Go it's a language feature and ESLint is not a language, it just allows you to create similar behaviour for JavaSvript which, by default, does not exhibit that behaviour.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Zig
Its little called google language.
that’s just clean coding. use your fucking vars