>1) try / catch >I'm not the most experienced java programmer (a year or so
>while i was at school), but i really disliked having to
>check for errors from a method with two separate blocks of
>code. I disliked even more the fact that you had to know
>the specific exception that each method would throw.


Actually I believe that the Java exception handling is quite elegant.
As a developer, you should already have an idea of where your errors might occur
(hence Perl's DIE, which you place after where you think a problem will occur),
and what type they will be (you expect to get an int and the user inputs a double brings about a ParseException)
and so writing Try/Catch statements makes sense. It localizes the error handling to the code that is most likely to bomb out.
Just my $0.02