Excellent article... I think another point you could have gone more into is how exceptions interact with multithreaded programming. Everyone always says you can't ignore exceptions, but that's not true... only exceptions in your application's main thread will take down the process. Exceptions in any other thread will just kill that thread. Also, handling exceptions in multithreaded programs becomes much more difficult, because you can't throw across thread boundaries, so now you need some different error handling mechanism to propagate errors in that case.