I guess you haven't used rust, or ocaml, or haskell.

In those cases, errors are even more like normal values because they're returned using generic types (Optional/Maybe, Result/Either), not using hacky multiple return stuff.

For example, in go you might have a function that returns (string, error), but you can't define a method on that type that was returned, so e.g. you can't have:

    func (tuple (string, error)) OrElse(val string) string {
        if tuple.1 == nil {
            return tuple.0
        } else {
            return val
        }
    }

This would let you right such code as:

    hostname := os.Hostname().OrElse("localhost")

On the other hand, in rust or haskell you'd return a generic sum type which is either an error or a value and which can be treated as an actually normal value.

This leads to the languages I mentioned above having the ability to have much cleaner and more concise error handling than go.

The fact that go has multiple returns, not tuples or sum types, results in its errors being really awkward to use values, among their other flaws.