alt Hacker NewsI assume you mean languages with exceptions.
You can't bubble up an exception, it's done automatically. That's a very important distinction. You can't make the decision to bubble up or not, because you do not have the required information - you don't know whether an exception can be thrown or not at any point. Therefore, you can't say you're making a decision at all.
Explicit error allows you to be able to make the decision.
No. Exceptions means the default is to bubble up. You can always write special handling code to prevent bubbling it up if you want in a language with exceptions.
So it's:
Rely on the programmer to identify that an error was made and in 95% of situations just bubble it up, do something useful 5% of the time, but "deal with" the error 100% of the time OR
Rely on the programmer to identify the 5% of situations where they don't want the error to just bubble up and add special handling for that case specifically.