I’ve lost a lot of respect for Joel Splosky after his rant about exceptions. Sorry, he’s just wrong. After using Java’s exceptions, I can’t imagine going back to checking return codes. That gives me bad memories of writing Unix socket code in C. Having to check return codes everywhere is really a PITA and makes code very unreadable. I usually agree with a lot of what Joel says, or at least respsect his opinion, so it’s rather disappointing to see him take such a bad position.

[Update] Ned Batchelder has an awesome writeup discussing the issue in more depth.