[eshyong]

Sounds like your company is just using a unidiomatic library. It's poor practice to return a zero value as an error instead of, well, returning the error. As someone else said, it's standard practice in the vast majority of all go code to return a value, error tuple and check at each call site. In fact, it's so common that it's the number 2 complaint about go code after not having generics (error handling too verbose).

Go has its problems, and it isn't a perfect language, but I have never felt unproductive using it. In fact, my company uses it for all backend services. It has a great stdlib and first class tooling. Most of the discussion in this thread seems to be coming from people who barely use it or have only dabbled with go.

As a tangent, it's really tiring to see HN engage ad nauseum in these pointless language debates. Every language has its place; use it when it's appropriate.