I honestly think exceptions will go down in history as a design mistake. Newer languages (eg Rust, Go) doesn't have them.

Exceptions make it incredibly difficult to be able to follow program flow. Most of the time you just log an exception and then either move on or exit. There's almost no actual handling of an except (other than maybe retrying). It gets even worse when people start using exceptions for control flow rather than errors.

One note about your example:

    > std::list <person*> people;

You wouldn't do this in C++. Why? Because ownership isn't clear meaning if people is cleaned up, it won't clean up the elements automatically. You could do:

    std::list<person> people;

but you have to be aware of copy semantics. You might do:

    std::list<std::unique_ptr<person>> people;

but that gets awkward too.