I'm with the grandparent. Every language that I've used that was created after C has included exceptions, and never once have I missed checking errno.
I can understand why, coming from a C++ context, you'd want to avoid them like the plague, but other languages (Python, Java, Smalltalk, ...) do a good job of making them a first-class citizen in the language, which saves a LOT of boilerplate typing. Seeing call stacks implementing a half-assed exception catching mechanism makes me sad. (Okay, Java only gets half credit here, since its checked exceptions inflict a different kind of boilerplate, but my larger point remains.)
Lack of exceptions is half the reason I'm not interested in writing Go code yet. The other half is that anything that seriously intends to replace C++ does need an escape hatch to allow manual memory management for when the GC's one-size-fits-all approach is simply a poor fit. For a language whose goal was explicitly to replace C++, this is an odd place to be tone deaf. I'm disappointed to see an attitude of "haha stupid C++ programmers don't understand that programmer efficiency is more important than CPU efficiency," instead of realizing that there are valid use cases where you do need to care about this and addressing them.
Did you miss the part where he says: "We weren't trying to design a better C++, or even a better C. It was to be a better language overall for the kind of software we cared about."
You're missing the forest for the trees. The topic of the article is about how good was motivated by creating a better language for systems software than C++, and hypothesizing why it's nevertheless getting more traction with the scripting crowd than C++ programmers.
"We—Ken, Robert and myself—were C++ programmers when we designed a new language to solve the problems that we thought needed to be solved for the kind of software we wrote. It seems almost paradoxical that other C++ programmers don't seem to care."
I can understand why, coming from a C++ context, you'd want to avoid them like the plague, but other languages (Python, Java, Smalltalk, ...) do a good job of making them a first-class citizen in the language, which saves a LOT of boilerplate typing. Seeing call stacks implementing a half-assed exception catching mechanism makes me sad. (Okay, Java only gets half credit here, since its checked exceptions inflict a different kind of boilerplate, but my larger point remains.)
Lack of exceptions is half the reason I'm not interested in writing Go code yet. The other half is that anything that seriously intends to replace C++ does need an escape hatch to allow manual memory management for when the GC's one-size-fits-all approach is simply a poor fit. For a language whose goal was explicitly to replace C++, this is an odd place to be tone deaf. I'm disappointed to see an attitude of "haha stupid C++ programmers don't understand that programmer efficiency is more important than CPU efficiency," instead of realizing that there are valid use cases where you do need to care about this and addressing them.
Which is unfortunate.