I don't think we should encourage this sort of behavior; Python already has excellent exceptions and handling and this only encourages the detrimental sloppines

I don't think we should encourage this sort of behavior; Python already has excellent exceptions and handling and this only encourages the detrimental sloppiness that one sees in JavaScript. If your program hits an unhandled exception, I'd wager 9 out of 10 times it's unexpected, and thus the only appropriate behavior is to stop, rather than to continue operating in a potentiallly totally unexpected and silently buggy (and dangerous) state. Fail hard and fail fast, while not always convenient, is far easier to debug and handle than the proposed alternative.