Absolutely agree. I think the Play JSON libraries are a good example of leaving that distinction to the user: you can either do jsonValue.as[SomeParsedType] whe

Absolutely agree. I think the Play JSON libraries are a good example of leaving that distinction to the user: you can either do jsonValue.as[SomeParsedType] when you want an exception, or jsonValue.validate[SomeParsedType] if you want to keep JsErrors in the normal flow of control. The language makes it very clear. (I tend to use .as() in practice, but in part that's because in the Try[X]/Future[X]/Either[T, X]/etc. monads exceptions work a lot like early returns, which is a nicely-bounded deviation from structured programming that I'm pretty okay with).