alt Hacker NewsAnd this is why I prefer exceptions.
Errors are common but they are errors: they absolutely represent an exceptional branch of your control flow every time.
It seems reasonable to ask if that int should even be available in the control flow syntactically.
Errors are just values, same as other values, it's in no way "exceptional" for a caller to get an error back from a call to some other code. If a function can fail it needs to return an error, if a function call fails the caller needs to deal with that error, not difficult stuff here. "Happy path" is no more or less important than "sad path" and both should be equally represented in the source code as written.