But they’re like, genuinely wild decisions? Unhinged is a great description!

The error design can return the value, or an error, or both, for some inexplicable reason and you can check it - or not - and if your function returned some indication of severe error, and you happen to not check it, you can totes just continue your program, in who knows what invalid state. Oh and also, because the devs are apparently deathly allergic to abstractions of apparently kind, you’ve got to do this janky little if err != nil check at. every. single. point. Which occludes your fundamentally important logic in pointless line noise, with zero opportunity for streamlining or improving the logic or guarantees.