The file_double code was, IMO, quoted completely out of context. If you go read the error handling section, that code is used as a motivation to the next section, where you get gradually introduced to more economical error handling.
The error handling chapter is... Really big. Because it tries to explain everything from first principles. But it does include explanation and examples for using easy error handling as well, whose syntactic noise and level of boiler plate come quite close to Python.
The error handling chapter is... Really big. Because it tries to explain everything from first principles. But it does include explanation and examples for using easy error handling as well, whose syntactic noise and level of boiler plate come quite close to Python.