I think the biggest barrier is still the compiler itself. The thing is built for compilation speed and not usefulness in terms of compille time semantics or readability of errors like the bad old days of GCC and GHC.
In this day and age, I shouldn't have to understand how a parser/lexer works to understand what an error really is, especially for super simple stuff like missing semicolon, bracket, parents or comma, misspelled symbol.
Small stuff like this is just a nussience for veterans, but I've seen it prove fatal on many an occasion for beginners who quicky get intimidated and start feeling stupid.
Delphi and Turbo Pascal are also built for speed, with more expressive languages, and are still able to provide sensible error messages, all the way back to MS-DOS days.
The compilation times were extremely short, and that’s on a 4.77 MHz CPU. (Too bad we are unlike the Ancient Egyptians who would’ve stuck with it for a couple of millennia.)
I never really felt that way about Go error messages, but I also came from Python, Java, C, C++ (via GCC and Clang) where the error messages are far, far worse. Maybe there are languages/toolchains where the error messages are better?
This is confusing to me, the pre-compilation tools catch these simple things instantly and display them right in your editor, which is far superior to having to wait until you compile to catch them.
In this day and age, I shouldn't have to understand how a parser/lexer works to understand what an error really is, especially for super simple stuff like missing semicolon, bracket, parents or comma, misspelled symbol.
Small stuff like this is just a nussience for veterans, but I've seen it prove fatal on many an occasion for beginners who quicky get intimidated and start feeling stupid.