I've recently started working in node after spending some time in Go-land and the reverse applies to me. The code I'm writing is a mix of js + Go and I find that in JS I have no sense for what can go wrong since it's not obvious to me if a method will throw an exception or not. However, with Go it forces me to think about my error path.

I do find littering code with err checks can be annoying and ended up reaching a compromise. For all code that is likely to be part of an externally public package I use 'if err !=' checks. For application level code that will be internal to my application (and internal to the file I'm working in) I use a small library [1] I wrote, that uses the panic-defer-recover style talked about in the Go documents for internal error handling [2].

However, I find that in most situations I usually prefer to not use panic-defer-recover, with if checks providing more clarity.

[1] https://github.com/surullabs/fault [2] http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#recover