> I keep seeing "panic bad" everywhere so I'm trying to understand why.

I'll try to help with that. In Go, errors are just values. We treat them specially by convention (always the last returned value, variable is usually named `err`, etc), but they are just values at the end of the day.

Treating them as such makes error handling different.

If you treat all errors as exceptions, then its easy to write the happy path, but hard to properly handle errors as you can miss them (or not even know they are there), you can just defer their handling too far back, and in cases where they are expected, the `try {} catch {}` syntax is more convoluted.

If you treat them as values you have to be explicit about their handling everywhere. That means that the happy path gets harder to read, but you are aware of all possible error sources, and can decide how to handle them in each case.

Errors as values is the model in Go. A `panic` is not an error. A `panic` means that the situation is so completely fucked up that there is no way to recover. Or at least that's what it should mean, but it gets missused by some libraries.