That's after 13 SLoC to make a single HTTP request - I like Go, but that seems almost like a parody. It's not that different from other languages, and the error handling makes it look longer, but for something described as "natural and idiomatic" I would expect it to be one function call plus one failure test, not six and three...
Checking and handling all possible error conditions is a GOOD thing.
As for single-threaded map, there are at least two necessary behaviors that handle errors very differently:
1. batch all errors/exceptions/etc and return them as an array 2. return on first error
I agree. But Go seems to have taken the most verbose way to achieve that. Pattern matching should have been the way to go if they did not want to use exceptions. Then again, Go does not have functional constructs, and you wouldn't be able to get far with it. Though it still prevents you from ignoring errors, unlike what exists in the language.
If you feel like golang needs one method to do all the above, feel free to write one and post it to the mailing list... I doubt that it does, but feel free.
Of course there are other cases where the difference matters. It just... doesn't seem very "natural and idiomatic" to me, that's all.