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If a function can't succeed there's no reason to continue executing it. Stopping and reporting the error to your caller is the common case and should not be discouraged by adding friction and obscuring the useful parts.

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And yet no one is deterred from proper error handling in Go. On the other hand, I see people fail to properly handle errors all the time in our Python/JS shop.

EDIT: This isn't some language partisanship; it's my observations from years of experience with the aforementioned languages (I work in a Python/JS shop). I'm guessing there are no formal data about this, so I'd be curious to hear other anecdotes whether they agree or conflict with mine.

Yeah, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. We also use Python at work and reviewing code is an absolute nightmare because you end up needing to dive deep into each function call to see if there are any exceptions being ignored. We're trying to enforce adding all possible exceptions in the docstrings but it's difficult because third party libraries (and even the standard library!) sometimes don't document them. Typically we have a catch-all Exception in our main loop and recover from there in case there's something we missed in dev and staging. I'd much prefer being able to know which functions have the ability to fail and why.

Thinking about control flow and organizing for clean structure is crucial for developping code bases of non-trivial size, and that should not be discouraged by encouraging superficial efficiencies.

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