But because exceptions bubble up the stack frame, there can be no missing checks. I'm not suggesting things be coded as: try: do something except Exce

But because exceptions bubble up the stack frame, there can be no missing checks. I'm not suggesting things be coded as: try: do something except Exception, err: pass If a piece of code is has a try/except, then it's because there is the expectation that it might fail and certain kinds of failures can be handled. If a failure is not one of the expected failures, then do a raise and let the exception go higher up. It's either going to hit a handler in the main program or will exit to command level. In either case there's a stack trace to see where the problem occurred. Exceptions tell you exactly where things blew up, whereas the "if err return" paradigm only does that if the test at each level adds identifying information. I've seen some Go stack traces. Talk about hard to backtrack: the ones I've seen go on and on. I understand it's because there are multple Goroutines running and each one has a stack trace, but they look pretty daunting to me.