[sethammons]

My first (real world) exposure to exceptions was Python. I was a bit above novice. I would write some code, run it, and it would die of some horrible exception. I would catch that exception, try again, and die again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually I would wrap everything in try-except blocks. Talk about verbose; tab indents everywhere. You can often end up handling exceptions somewhere not immediately close to the call that failed.

I liked when I started with Go (mostly due to concurrency primatives, but errors were nice too). In my day job, many of the errors have a need for custom handling and I get that for "free" in Go and I am never surprised by a program crash because I failed to read the docs on a function and what exceptions it may throw (or undocumented exceptions it may throw due to one of its dependencies). I can see right in the signature that I have an error to potentially handle.

[umanwizard]

Maybe you would like the concept of "checked exceptions" from Java? Exceptions are part of a method signature and not handling them is a compiler error, but they're still exceptions, not return values.