Granted, even though Go shoves its errors in your face, it's still common to just punt the error up the stack (if err != nil { return err }), leading to ahem "c

Granted, even though Go shoves its errors in your face, it's still common to just punt the error up the stack (if err != nil { return err }), leading to ahem "context-free" error messages like "Failed to initialize Foo: EOF". You can improve on this a little by using something like https://github.com/pkg/errors https://github.com/pkg/errors, which gives your errors a stack trace by default. But now your errors are hideous and unlikely to be fixable by the average user. Ultimately the only way to get clean, informative, and debuggable error messages is for the programmer to attend to each and every one. And no one wants to do that, because it's a pain, it slows you down, it gets in the way of solving The Problem At Hand. So unless the language itself somehow forces you to wrap all your errors in nice context strings, it ain't gonna happen.