What's the reasonable alternative to exceptions? Checking return status or errno after every single function call and then manually propagating it upwards? (opt

What's the reasonable alternative to exceptions? Checking return status or errno after every single function call and then manually propagating it upwards? (optional is a bit better but also falls into this category) Programmers are way too lazy for this and it usually ends up as either a redundant assert() crashing the whole application or just logging a error and continue with broken state. Exceptions is following the "let it crash" philosophy from erlang, instead of broken recovery code scattered all over your code. (Crash doesn't necessarily mean a linux process in this context, more of a high level) This is a very powerful concept that allows you to think about the bigger picture such as if _anything_ unexpected happens inside this transaction, return a error to the user and continue processing the next request from the next user. Error handling should be done by layers, not by grunt work. There are situations where I agree you might want to know how a certain function can fail, here I think javas checked exceptions strike a good balance between control vs verbosity as you just have to add a throws-clause if you don't want to handle a specific error at that point in the code.