Sure, if you're in a GUI then you report to the user that an operation failed and it's up to them to figure out what they can do about it. As for infrastructur

Sure, if you're in a GUI then you report to the user that an operation failed and it's up to them to figure out what they can do about it. As for infrastructural software, yes you want to handle errors in a more thoughtful manner. If you can't and the process has corrupted it's own stack or heap (in the case of C or C++) then sure, abort. But I'm saying this line is often chucked over to "log the exception and do nothing" too quickly because it's often the easier thing to do. 25% of catastrophic failures in this one study appear to occur because of this. tl;dr: The devil is in the "If you can't".