I disagree, (And I can tell you have not done any coding in Java). Exceptions are exceptional, but they need not be fatal errors. In OO development it makes sense for a method call to return useful results via it's normal return, and to signal problems via thrown exceptions that can be caught by the caller. (or further up the call stack).

For example, consider the Java exception class java.io Class FileNotFoundException. If you where writing an interactive application, then it would usually make sense to catch this exception, because the likely cause would be something like the user mis-typing a file name. In other words, not a fatal error, but something that can easily be dealt with. It is also a subclass of java.io.IOException, which makes sense as in a lot of situations you would want to handle many different types of I/O problems in the same way, so you can catch them all by having a catch statement for the superclass.

Compare that with using return codes to indicate exceptions. You end up in a situation where -1 is File not found, -2 is permission denied etc. You have to document all the different return codes, and carefully propagate them back through several layers of callers. Your code also becomes much more verbose as you need to check return codes on every API call, and save them to propagate back up, this becomes doubly complicated if you are using a third party API with a different convention on what is meant by each status number. It is far easier, (and more concise) to write clean code that mostly assumes that stuff will work, and does not needlessly repeat exception handling stuff.

Another great feature of exception handling via throwing and catching them is that the catch can be several calls up the stack from the throw. So you can have a private method that actually does the work several layers down from the public methods of a class and still reliably return errors.