I think you may have hit on something subtle. To me, it's better to have two completely distinct modes: I'm either dealing with errors or not. Then if an error occurs, I can expect one of two things -- either it should be handled or it should crash. I've noticed in some exception-using code I've encountered that a lot of times, error conditions are tested and then not really handled -- they're either silently ignored, or dealt with by some half-measure. To me, silent failures are much more insidious than crashes. This halfway style of error handling is the worst of all worlds, IMO, and it might be encouraged by exceptions. Java forces you to acknowledge errors that you have no need to, and probably pushes you toward this gray area when you're not sure how to handle things yet. Then, later, it's totally non-obvious what's truly handled and what isn't. It also clutters up your code. Clarity is often more beneficial than reflexive error-checking.