Well I don't know your experience, but most Java developers I've seen either throw the exception, or suppress it... If they throw it, it eventually ends up as A

Well I don't know your experience, but most Java developers I've seen either throw the exception, or suppress it... If they throw it, it eventually ends up as ABCGenericException and you've probably got no chance to reasonably recover. If you suppress it you end up with a nasty side effect (a null somewhere perhaps) that causes the app to bomb in another unexpected piece of code. Exceptions are a language semantic - in itself it doesn't make your code robust. You still need to apply it correctly. But! The reality is the same applies to C too. What the original author was alluding to what that the mentality of C encourages coders to look deeper into their errors.