That wasn't the argument Dave made. He said that handled error returns became invisible, because the repetition lulled programmers. That's the argument I felt was untenable.

Obviously, Go does some things to mitigate the risk of ignored error returns; the damnable use requirement means that multi-valued functions returning errors either have to explicitly ignore the error by assigning it to "_", which feels as squicky as it should, or be assigned to a variable with which (usually) something must later be done.

It's not perfect, I'll freely concede.