I am not a huge fan of exceptions per se, but it’s important to understand that they are a heuristic for minimizing ‘worry’ about things that are unlikely. I am not saying it’s a good thing, I am saying it’s the way people naturally work.

Let’s say there is a function that’s 20 lines long, and if you did a thorough analysis of possible error conditions, regardless of likelihood, you might come up with 50 or more.

We are not going to write code to address all 50 possibilities from the start. Instead, we are going de facto to wait and see what fails in the real world, and address them as we discover them, because we value our time. We make an economic distinction between a 1-in-1,000 problem, and a 1-in-1,000,000,000 problem.

Is this un-robust? Yes. Are we allowing exceptions to be a control-flow catch-all? Yes. Would a Go-like approach of simply returning error conditions reduce bugs? Probably. But it’s important to recognize programmers’ ‘revealed preference’ for exceptions.