Comment by natefinch

I've been writing Go for over 6 years. Error handling at the source of failure is a feature, not a bug.

Rob Pike's example code is bad and I would not allow it through a code review. Why? It makes the code lie. It appears as though the writes cannot fail, but in fact they can, and later writes become no-ops. On top of that, it means that you lose the context of which write failed. Did you fail writing the header, the body, or the footer? You can't know anymore.

This is like

   try {
        doThing()
        doThing2()
        doThing3()
   catch (Exception ex) {
      // handle
   }

You can't tell what failed. You can't tell what is possible to fail. The handler can't differentiate.