No, you don't need the 'try / catch' syntax, but in Go you can ignore errors. And instead of 'try / catch', you have the frustrating 'if err != nil { return ni

No, you don't need the 'try / catch' syntax, but in Go you can ignore errors. And instead of 'try / catch', you have the frustrating 'if err != nil { return nil, nil }'. io.Copy(out, in) Did you know io.Copy returns an error? It does, and I rarely see it handled. You don't need to explicitly '_' ignore things. If you're about to say 'errcheck', well, great, it's not built into the language and what matters is practice; large go codebases do not use errcheck typically. Also, errcheck only handles things that fill the error interface, which e.g. the 'bool ok' return values (such as from map accesses) do not. With Java exceptions, at least, you must explicitly handle an exception in some way. If you don't try/catch it, you have to add the throws declaration to your method. You have to handle that case. Furthermore, you know exactly what sort of error it is. In Go, you get the silly "error" interface. So it's something. Have fun figuring out how to handle it. It's not like the language encourages you to just return 'errors.New/fmt.Errorf' so there's actually no way short of complicated regex string matches to figure out what error case you're actually handling. You don't get given all possible types of the error, if you try to switch on err == io.EOF or err == io.UnexpectedEOF or so on, how will you know that you got them all? The compiler sure as hell won't tell you. With exceptions, you typically do have to get them all, you do have to account for all the types (and if you add a new type further down the stack, you'll have to make sure you handled it correctly further up). You can just catch 'Exception' and be in a similar place to Go, but at least Exceptions give you the option to do things more right. Your point makes utterly no sense to me. Between Go 'errors' and Java 'Exceptions', only exceptions a) Make you actually think about and handle every one of them b) Can give you information about all possible types it may have and c) allow you to elegantly let a parent function handle it without 3 lines of utterly boilerplate code after every single function call. Sometimes I think that Gophers just want to feel like they're handling errors. so they love 10% of their code being utterly worthless while not actually having any common way to handle specific error types and while managing to make worse error handling then every single other modern language, and then be proud of it.