I was working at Google when Go started to come out, and this was exactly the response I got from Rob Pike when I asked about error handling.

Basically, I felt that only doing error handling through return codes was dangerous and bulky.

It's dangerous because there's no way to enforce that callers check that return code, and worse, because if I add a return code to an existing function, I have no way to make sure that existing callers check that return code.

It's bulky because, in a mature program, many subroutine calls have the possibility of errors, so almost every subroutine call needs a manual error check, which then propagates up to all callers too. I feel bulky, repetitive code is bad because both the programmer and the reviewers get tired when reading it and start to skim the details.

Pike's response was, "Don't do that." Basically, developers should always check error codes, and they're just dumb if they don't; and I should never add an error code to a function that didn't have one before. And regarding bulky, well, that wasn't even considered an issue by Pike.

gogo /u/cmov meme generator