Exception Handling Considered Harmful (2005)
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Exception Handling
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Software Development
The article 'Exception Handling considered harmful' (2005) argues against the use of exception handling in programming, sparking a discussion on its merits and drawbacks.
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Oct 17, 2025 at 1:06 PM EDT
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“Exceptions suck” is one of those widely held bad opinions that claims to be contrarian in software dev right up there with “OO sux”. Sure exceptions suck in C++ but that’s basically “C++ sux” and the cost of the stack traces is worse that I wish it was but one the defining traumas of my career was typing in a C program from Byte magazine and noticing how the clear logic was defaced by error handling code and how I felt like I’d come home when I started coding in Java and I was no longer 3x my code but rather it was more like 1x + constant.