Sure, it depends on the situation. In the case you outline, there could also be room for an auxiliary function like fetch_alternatives({ preferred_resouce, seco

Sure, it depends on the situation. In the case you outline, there could also be room for an auxiliary function like fetch_alternatives({ preferred_resouce, second_best_resource , third_best_resource}) that would fetch them in until one can actually be obtained and throw an exception if all of them fail. Not that I am married to exceptions or anything. One should just use what is best in the situation that one is in. Actually, I think articles that claim that one language construct is better than some other language construct are quite silly. It mostly depends on the situation. Though, there also may be language constructs that are best left off deprecated, depending the language that you are using.