> Every time I switch back to exception languages, I get this tendency to "assume everything succeeds all the time, and handle it at the very top level in case

> Every time I switch back to exception languages, I get this tendency to "assume everything succeeds all the time, and handle it at the very top level in case any part of it fails" See, I get the exact opposite tendency. Exceptions mean that any statement, no matter how seemingly trivial from the caller's perspective, can fail. It means I'm constantly thinking "If an exception is thrown between X() and Y(), does it break any assumptions I've made about the program state?". You end up with hacks like putting code in finally blocks just to prevent partial execution. I think exceptions would work fine in a language that also had built-in support for transactional memory, where you could commit or rollback operations when an exception is thrown partway through. Without any language support, though, I think that exceptions and mutable state do not play nicely with one another.