[fauigerzigerk]

>My point is, a lot of good error handling is built at the lowest level, close to the point of failure.

This is very true for some types of errors and for some types of programs but not true at all for others, which is why this debate has been going on and on for decades.

An extremely common example for the latter is programs that touch a DBMS or file system on every other line. You don't want to see error handling code for "database is gone" or "local disk is gone" events all over the place.

The information required to handle these errors just doesn't exist in the local context. So the only reasonable question is how to let those errors bubble up to some central location where you can handle them or decide to abort.

In my opinion there are good arguments for and against both exceptions and error returns. But if error returns are used, then there must be some reasonably ergonomic way to do it, i.e not what Go does right now.

[jrockway]

I just don't agree with adding more syntax to the language for what basically amounts to an if statement. If it's a conditional, which it is, just use an if statement.

Look at all the monad tutorials for Haskell. Nobody knows how to use the special syntax for Maybe and Either. They read hundreds of articles and still don't get it. Meanwhile, everyone understands how "if err != nil" works, perhaps too well, which is why they complain about it.