It probably is Go's propensity to return error values whereas Python would bubble them up. Every action in Docker involves an I/O error at a minimum (since you're talking to the Docker daemon) so this is basically a worst-case scenario for error handling boilerplate. I don't doubt that Python is better for scripting in this case, but if you want to make an application that interfaces with Docker, Go is probably the better of the two (despite its boilerplate). In fact, I vaguely recall running into a bunch of Python-related bugs in docker-compose (it was at an old gig, and I haven't used docker-compose since, so I don't recall the particulars).
Still, creating a method that calls several other methods one after another is programming 101, so I refuse to entertain the though that creating a "containers.run" method similar to the one from the Python API is not possible in Go. The error handling is definitely not the culprit, you can check the error after each "subcommand" and return early with this error. The question is just, why didn't they do it?
