I'm not a Go programmer, but I feel like I've sort of "grown up" around them as the language has evolved. for a while I thought that the `if err != nil { ... }` was silly to put everywhere. As I've grown and written a lot more code, however, I actually don't see a problem with it. I'd even go as far as to say that it's a good thing because you're acknowledging the detail that an error could have occurred here, and you're explicitly choosing to pass the handling of it up the chain. with exceptions, there can be a lot of hidden behavior that you're just sweeping under the rug, or errors happen that you didn't even think could be raised by a function.