The reason I, personally, don't like it is it's basically a slight improvement over C's error handling when everyone else has substancially improved. In C, basically every function could fail and you needed to check the return code. In some cases you'd need to make up an impossible value to return to signal error and in some cases (e.g. functions returning binary data) you would need some other global variable to be tested. So Go fixed all the error signalling issues bit still has the problem of needing to check every function return... which no one is going to do. In C, if printf fails that's usually just going to happen without the program noticing. In any language with more modern error handling (note: not just exceptions) printing can't silently fail.