Abstract: Google's Go programming language was one of the fastest growing languages of 2016
and is poised for explosive growth in the coming years. One of the key
features that has helped make Go a success has been it's coherent and
simple design that focuses on straightforward, idiomatic approaches to
developing software. As the amount of production Go code begins to expand,
we may start to find limitations in some existing idioms around how Go
code is structured. For developers who want to push the boundaries of
quality in our applications, it's vital that we understand how to
transform and adopt idioms within our code that favor quality and make
defects both apparent and difficult to create.
Many functional programming languages, especially those in the ML
language family, have a rich history of facilitating development
idioms that enforce safety on the user through programing constructs
like phantom types and monadic error handling. In this talk, we'll look
at how we can take lessons learned from those functional languages and
apply them to our Go applications with the explicit goal of improving
application quality by reducing the potential for errors.
Learning Outcomes: - Attendees will learn several techniques for handling errors in Go code, as well as idoms for reducing the surface area of potential error cases. Attendees should be able to take the concepts introduced in this talk and use them to develop novel Go idioms for improving code quality, and should develop an appreciation for circumstances that make it appropriate to deviate from traditional idioms used in the Go community.
