The way I see it, Proper error logging > Stack traces >> No stack traces. Proper error logging requires effort whatever you do. In some languages, even if you d

The way I see it, Proper error logging > Stack traces >> No stack traces. Proper error logging requires effort whatever you do. In some languages, even if you don't put in any effort, you still get stack traces (most exception-based languages), in others you get almost no context (C++, Go, Haskell etc). If your team is spending time on good error messages, then it doesn't matter as much what language-level error support there is. If this time isn't being spent, I think you'll have a much nicer debugging experience in a system which at least collects stack traces. Even for your example, let's say the stack trace is: NoSuchHostException in stdlib.LookupHost() line 341 called from stdlib.HttpGet() line 6131 called from applicationLogic.DoSomething() line 123 called from main.main() line 3 In Go, with similar effort spent on error reporting along the way (if err != nil { return nil, err } vs automatic exception propagation) you'd find Failed to do something: "no such host" I think there's a much better chance to figure out what happened in the first case.