That quote conflates errors and exceptions. An error is an unsuccessful result. An exception, however, precludes any result at all. Sometimes they are the same,

That quote conflates errors and exceptions. An error is an unsuccessful result. An exception, however, precludes any result at all. Sometimes they are the same, but in many cases they are different. Asking to retrieve a table that doesn't exist is an error, because the answer is that there is no table; the operation was unsuccessful. There failed to be retrieved any table, but as the table always could have either existed or not, this is not an exceptional case. Nothing went wrong: you simply asked to retrieve a table and no table was found, so you get that back as an error. However, trying to perform a table operation on that unsuccessful result generates an exception, because you violated a contract: you can't operate on something that doesn't exist. Sure, you can operate on the representation of nonexistence (that is, null), but you attempted to operate on a table and you don't have one. The computation stops prematurely with an exception because the operation expects the table to necessarily exist. There is no unsuccessful result to be returned because the operation didn't even make it to the point of failing; the performance itself of the operation failed. The operation is entirely invalid and returning any result would be incorrect. At least, that is my personal understanding of the terms. For example, most things in Rust are errors and not exceptions, because exceptions (panics) generally terminate the thread, or abort the process, depending on user preference or runtime environment. Anything that isn't fatally unrecoverable deserves to be an error - in other words, a `Result::Err` - which can be handled by the caller, as opposed to panics, which are not guaranteed to be catchable (unwinding is not a required part of the language, it is an optional convenience). Most failures in JavaScript are exceptions, because you are not made to check anything, and everything is dynamically typed, so if you make an assumption that isn't true, an exception has to be raised to stop you. Luckily, there is try/catch. It can also be difficult to represent errors without exceptions, you instead have things called "error states" which are basically certain non-errors being treated as errors by user code, when either that result is undesired even if perfectly normal, or that result is the only/easiest way for the error to be reported by the source. Anyway, my point is that the article probably means to use the term exception and say that a boolean is better than an exception when the error isn't an exceptional case. And in that case I would agree. In Rust, I don't want my program to crash when I ask for a nonexistent table - I only want that to happen later if I decide that the table's nonexistence is a fatal error in the context of the whole thread.