Agreed on async. You better know if a function does IO, hiding that can lead to nasty surprises.

Fun it is not.

    if err != nil

It's amazing how they managed to design a new language with all the flaws of '90s languages.

Even that is fun. A little tedious, but straighforward, no compiler magic.

C# (.NET) would probably be the winner here. Go standard library is rather minimalistic compared to it.