But if the error-code people had won, then life would still be good, because then Rust's stdlib might have been a bit uglier, but it would at least be correct with respect to error propagation. It's because Rust tries to satisfy both camps --- because it tries to give you the concision of exception code and, er, the lack of actual exceptions --- that it's forced into the terrible position of needing to abort internally on error, lacking a way to report errors to higher level code.

The lesson here is that optimizing for happiness and harmony leads to bad design.