You can't stop people from being lazy. Look at all the Java and Python code that forcefully ignores exceptions.

It is something that can be caught with static analysis, however. Someone recently put together an appropriate tool[1] for Go, in fact. It seems to work very well.

[1]https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck

To be fair, the ability to use static analysis for error code checking is not something that is unique to Go. There was a paper recently on doing this for C (which found hundreds of bugs in the Linux kernel due to incorrect error code handling):

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~liblit/ghc-2011/ghc-2011.pdf

(Incidentally, the hard part of this analysis is not verifying that you checked the error, it's verifying that you propagated the error codes properly—that requires analyzing higher-order control flow.)

Go AST is something that I think will really help as it grows for writing great tooling.

To allow lazy error checking without losing safety, perhaps Go could special case _ so that error codes assigned to _ abort for failure values.

I would love something like this, actually.

I'm not sure I like the idea of special casing _ specifically, but a similarly concise way of saying "if this fails, this thread of execution is FUBAR" would be great.

"!!", maybe?

Could just be "!" by itself no?

They can't change that at this stage without breaking the Go 1.0 compatibility promise.