I certainly agree that if you are thinking carefully about the code, either way should work just fine. As someone who likes C and Python I understand that both

I certainly agree that if you are thinking carefully about the code, either way should work just fine. As someone who likes C and Python I understand that both ways can make robust software, and it took me a little time to accept exceptions at all. More broadly, most of the languages that are widely used can write decent software. I think this is a matter of what you prefer the program to do by default, when something clearly wrong has happened, but no error-handling code has been written: you may prefer such code to halt, or you may prefer it to keep on trucking. If you use exceptions, you have to think about it IF you want the program to keep on trucking. Otherwise you can just let exceptional circumstances take care of themselves - if the program stops immediately, it cannot then behave incorrectly. As a default failure mode, I do prefer the program to halt and decline to further cock up the situation (forcing me and my tests to deal with the condition) than for the program to silently swallow the error and continue as a default (forcing me to thoroughly check error codes everywhere up front out of pure fear that I will miss a condition). This is just a convention and either one works. If Go can become a better version of C then I might switch out C for Go. This isn't by any means going to cause me to give up Python because I use C for very specific reasons (when it is totally OK for reasons of speed or control to write a decent amount more code, and have it read more cryptically, and have to take care of many more low-level details).