> This is a problem for values of all types, not just errors. One I'm not sure we've figured out how to solve[1]. There are a few languages out there that force

> This is a problem for values of all types, not just errors. One I'm not sure we've figured out how to solve[1]. There are a few languages out there that force variable assignment to try and address the problem, but even then there is really nothing to say that you haven't accidentally ignored the variable assigned. The difference is that the happy case is well-tested. If you aren't handled the error-free route you probably will notice that very quickly unless you aren't testing your code, even manually. e.g. it doesn't matter if you ignore normal variable assignments because the programmer will usually catch that themselves. They will not likely catch all of the possible error assignments without some help. > To be fair, if you are able to completely leave out entire blocks of logic without anyone noticing even under the most cursory of testing, perhaps it wasn't actually needed? Forgetting entire code branches isn't exactly a subtle bug. In this case we were silently ignoring errors which caused multiple types of issues that we had to then manually track down. This is an entire class of defects that can be avoided with better tooling, either at the language level with checked exceptions, or with a linter like errcheck.