> But what I'm talking about here is genuine runtime exceptions (which NPE is in Java, of course), where the design of the system says that this piece of data c

> But what I'm talking about here is genuine runtime exceptions (which NPE is in Java, of course), where the design of the system says that this piece of data cannot be missing and yet, at runtime, you encounter a case where it is missing, erroneously, because of some bug somewhere. My experience is that this is the less common of the cases in a production environment (vs dev where one may be experimenting a bit more).