Right, when java forces try/catch blocks around code, the tendancy is often for someone to throw the exception back up, and to write exception handling code around the whole program, which, in that case, is equivalent to a die(). Bad style, IMHO.

While exceptions are useful for error handling for basic java systems API's (Files, Sockets, etc) -- it's just as easy to let one crash the app as it is to avoid checking a return code in C. A developer has to be very diligant, and in all cases, smarter than the compiler. If you start to find exceptions annoying and don't give them respect, they will bite your head off and leave you with random errors that taunt your programs for years!

That referred to Java. I don't use C++ exceptions. My dialect of C++ is essentially "C with classes", and STL only when absolutely required. Exception handling in C can be very buggy, and when you mix C++ exception handling with Java JNI, very bad things can happen! (i.e. uncaught exceptions due to using different compilers between the JVM and C++ code). I'll stick to "C with classes" when I can, or better yet, just C.