What I wonder about is the pool of potential Go developers. Is the error handling issue serious enough to stop developers from even considering Go? Go would have been an obviously better choice than most languages 30 years ago, but today there are many more good options.
> Is the error handling issue serious enough to stop developers from even considering Go
If it is, then I suspect those developers are going to have a thousand other non-overlapping reasons not to consider Go. It seems like a colossal waste of time to court these people compared with optimizing Go for the folks who already are using it or who reasonably might actually use it (for example, people who would really like to use Go, but it doesn't support their platform, or it doesn't meet some compliance criteria, or etc).
Let's say Go has such bad error handling that it becomes the number one reason people don't use it.
The people left that do use it will be the ones that don't care about error handling. Hence you're asking the people that don't care versus 90% of the audience you've already lost.
I don’t think you understood my comment. My argument was not “we should only care about Go users”, it was that we should not prioritize the opinions of people who may not even become users even if error handling is changed over the opinions of people who are very likely to use Go or those who already do.
Specifically, if Go’s error handling poses a constitutional objection for you, it’s probably just one item in a long list of things that prevent you from using the language. Changing everything to pacify you will take a long time and likely involve many breaking changes, and the end result is likely to be something that does not appeal to Go’s users or even many of the people who shared your objection about error handling but not all of your other objections.
If you shake things up so much that users who previous dismissed your language are interested, you might also be making a big enough change that your current users look around as well. The pool of prospective new language users is always large but they won’t join a language that is dying because it churned all its existing users and package maintainers.
I say this as someone that gets a very bad taste in my mouth when handling errors in go but use it a fair bit nonetheless.
If you're writing the universe, maybe. There aren't that many competitors when you take the ecosystem into consideration. It is the only reason I tolerate Go where it makes (some) sense — mostly CLI utilities that are too complicated for bash.
