Not really understanding the iPhone reference or how it relates here. Sounds like the problem you have with the error checking relates more to development prac

Not really understanding the iPhone reference or how it relates here. Sounds like the problem you have with the error checking relates more to development practice of colleagues than the language. We used defer frequently. Never considered it ugly. 'goto' (hypothesising here as not used it) and use of exception handling that is expected to be handled at edge of boundary points in codebase can be elegant but does need careful thought and design is my experience. Can hide all sorts of issues, lead to a lot of spurious error handling for those that don't understand the intent. That's the biggest issue I have with implicit (magical) error handling - too many people do it poorly.