This would probably be used in places where, if the “x” in assert(x) doesn’t hold, then the program could do more harm than good. You’ll generally try to handle

This would probably be used in places where, if the “x” in assert(x) doesn’t hold, then the program could do more harm than good. You’ll generally try to handle situations that are recoverable without blowing up stuff like this, but in some software and some situations you want it to blow up fast rather than destroy data or whatever. I program in Python more, which has slightly different assert behavior so it’s considered more of a code smell in that language, but it seems like Java programmers use it more because it can be turned off easily when not wanted.