The competition for the most used code snippet has a clear winner: if err != nil. Whoever wrote this ten thousand times should get the award.
A Medium post was published on August 9, 2026, which was a retrospective comparing a Go vs a Rust production backend rewrite. It re-ignited the oldest flamewar on the internet: is Go's error handling a wart or a feature?
The complaint everyone repeats
You've probably heard that Go is too wordy, if err != nil is just clutter, proper languages use Result and ?.
The complaint is further substantiated by the Go Developer Survey from April 9, 2024. 13% of the respondents indicated that "verbosity of error handling" was a challenge.
