I agree. I just finished porting a python module to go. Go was certainly more tedious to code and was 1.6x (not 5x) the size. Explicit error handling not only means you have to check e v e r y t h i n g that returns an error code but also you can't embed calls within calls. For example, to convert text to b64 and then to gzip that, in python you can write b = gzip(b64(text)). In go you have to call the b64 routing first and save the result and check the error, then do the same for the gzip call. (insert sweat emogi here).