In go there are the "init" functions, but those do not return a possible error result.

I guess you're thinking more of package constructor methods, such as NewFoo, which tend to return the new object and an error value.

I think elsewhere in this thread the point has already been made so I thought to spare the Ink. A constructor is essentially a function that returns a value. There's little reason to think that constructors are more than that. A few examples: in JS, a constructor is a method called `constructor()`. It's a bit special in that it's the method that is privileged to be the one called when the class name is preceded by the keyword `new`, but that's almost about it. It can be replaced or supported by one or more factory functions, and this is what happened with NodeJS's `Buffer` class and generals JS's `Array` class. In Ruby, the constructor is just a method called `new()`, and I guess it's not special beyond there being a convention to construct new instances with a method called `.new()`. Like any function, a constructor has an input and an output value. For example, in `new Point 3, 4` the input is the pair of numbers `( 3, 4 )` (here written spread out, but it doesn't matter), and its output is an instance of class `Point`. Say you have a class List that accepts as only parameter the length (number of elements) of the `List`. When I call a function `build_list length: -4` I expect the `length` argument to be suitably interpreted, or an error to be thrown. Most of the time a list with a negative number of elements does not make a lot of sense, so the natural thing is to indicate an error, which in many current languages is done by throwing an exception so as to prevent silent failures. When I call a constructor as `new List length: -4` I naturally expect the exact same considerations to apply.