>Either you're some kind of a super-human, or your code bases are really tiny. Yes, you usually can figure out the trigger of a null pointer exception, but not

>Either you're some kind of a super-human, or your code bases are really tiny. Yes, you usually can figure out the trigger of a null pointer exception, but not the source that made it happen and with complex software the stack-trace can get a mile long ;-) Ok even if the stack trace is 10 miles long, you just need to go to the end, right? :P Anyway, so an exception gets thrown and Scala forces you to explicitely throw an exception, am I right? How does the other case not crash your program unless you catch it? >Also, people bitching about Exceptions have yet to give us a more reliable way of dealing with runtime errors. The only thing that comes closest to an alternative is Erlang and yet again, the Go language designers took no inspiration from it. Go uses panic (Go-speak for exceptions) for really bad errors: out of memory, nil pointer dereference... You can catch them like in other well-known languages. The only difference: your catch blocks aren't cluttered with handling for non-exceptional errors like file doesn't exist etc. You are forced to handle those explicitely. Why is this good? Except for those truly exceptional errors, the state of your programs is much easier to determine.