I thought it would be a deal breaker for me, too. C/C++/C#/Python have been my standard languages... but after coding in it for a while, I love it. You never have to worry if someone downstream is going to throw an exception make your function exit before it gets to the end. That means you can write robust code without needing a ton of try/catch everywhere, or using statements (from C#) or whatever.

Yes, there's some of this:

if f, err := io.Open("foo.txt"); err != nil {

   return err

} else {

   // use f

}

However, that's not really any more code than

try:

    f = open("foo")

    // use f

except IOError as e:

    return e // or throw, or whatever

Plus Go uses multiple returns everywhere, so you don't have to worry about errors being confused with actual data returned.

It's pretty awesome.