Comment by joobus

Being fluent in Python and Go, I definitely prefer the explicit error handling in Go as opposed to the try-catch error handling in python where most of the time you can never really be sure of all the possible errors which can be thrown. I spent some time learning Haskell, and one of the points that stuck was that in languages with exception handling, a function will have some kind of declared result, but all the different exceptions which can be thrown are also basically alternative return values. Any caller of the function then has to know all possible return types to effectively handle all errors, but since most code doesn't document which errors might be thrown, it's a crap shoot. Functional languages basically force the return to always be the declared type, and go mostly follows this model.