I don't like die

/me too. In fact my programs are perfect and never die. Being such a perfect programmer, not only the OS and environment and filesystem they run on are also perfect and never cause failures, etc. but even the users of my programs are perfect (the most prominent one being myself - so that's already a guaranteee!) and never make errors like supplying inexistent files, etc.

Seriously, web development is not the whole world. die is a perfectly valid and handy language feature - indeed for complex applications, possibly running a GUI, it is sensible to adopt other ways round other than dieing, like warning the user and asking for more input. But for a script that expects a filename on the cmd line to parse, I can't see a more intelligent option than to die, if the file does not exist, for example.