In your example, it should be an error because it’s an environmental problem (could be file system permissions). Sure, it could be a developer fail where they h

In your example, it should be an error because it’s an environmental problem (could be file system permissions). Sure, it could be a developer fail where they hardcoded the wrong path (surely any kind of testing would pick this up?) but it’s still an error in the environment where had the path been correct it could fail due to something the user misconfigured. So it needs to be handled as a user facing error. Exceptions do exist in Go, it’s called “Panic”. This whole “Go doesn’t have exceptions” meme is completely untrue. It’s just not the preferred way of error handling because, unsurprisingly, most application errors are going to be environmental. But if you select an out of bounds index in a slice or don’t handle a nil pointer correctly you’d get a panic — because those are clearly developer issues that warrant a stack trace rather than environmental problems that need a friendly user facing error message.