I was just trying to argue in good faith by addressing the spirit of your criticism, not the letter of it. As I said, go and look at the prevailing usage of def

I was just trying to argue in good faith by addressing the spirit of your criticism, not the letter of it. As I said, go and look at the prevailing usage of defer. Closing a file is trivial most of the time. When closing something (a file, net connection, db connection) you're really worried about, that's when you ought to think twice about using defer. That's really all I'm saying. I'm not sure what's wrong with multiple returns, as you're no worse off than if you were using exceptions. At least return is a standard, predictable mechanism which behaves the same regardless of what codebase you're in: exit the current function. You don't have to guess what file you need to look at next; control reverts to the caller. And, as far as the example code is concerned, it is completely orthogonal to exceptions vs. error codes. You still have to prioritize what's catastrophic enough to abort and notify the caller, and what isn't. The author decided those errors weren't important. So what's the big deal?