I suspected this was coming, and it's unfortunate. If Go had implemented try, then in a year everyone would be happy using it and the controversy would have died down. I've seen this happen before.
Unfortunately, the community that has sprung up around Go is more or less opposed to new language features on principle.
> Unfortunately, the community that has sprung up around Go is more or less opposed to new language features on principle.
I think this comes straight from the original go team. Rob Pike had a talk[1] that is partly about why go doesn't keep adding features and why it doesn't have certain features that other languages have. I think people who like go have bought into the idea that the go team has made good trade-offs to make go code easier to read and maintain at the expense of expressibility.
The controversy may have died down, but the impact on code written would have been permanent.
There's a lot of value to there being "one way to do things", even when it's not the best way from any particular point of view.
Go holds this principle higher than most other languages and I think that should be either embraced, or one should look elsewhere - and I'm saying that as someone who "looked elsewhere".
I think you make a reasonable point that is worthy of discussion. Unfortunately there's a group of people on this thread that are downvoting comments such as yours instead of discussing them. I'd like to see reasoned responses to your comment, i.e. tell us why you are wrong instead of the downvote brigading.
Agreed, no one is forced to use Go. I think it is refreshing to see a language like Go. You don't want all languages to asymptotically approach each other in features. We need diversity in our languages, that way you have flavors to choose from.
I suspect some people are. Languages have network effects, which get stronger when FFI is uncommon. My team and codebase mostly keep me on Java even though I find Kotlin clearer in every way and I'd love to get better with Scala and Haskell. If for some reason my team switched to something like Go or VB I'd have to find another job or else put up with it.
Unfortunately, the community that has sprung up around Go is more or less opposed to new language features on principle.