The biggest difference between try-catch and error values syntactically IMO is that the former allows you to handle a specific type of error from an unspecified place and the latter allows you to handle an unspecified type of error from a specific place. So the type checking is more cumbersome with error values whereas enclosing every individual source of exceptions in its own try-catch block is more cumbersome than error values. You usually don't do that, but you usually don't type-check error values either.