alt Hacker NewsI will freely go on the record as saying that there's nothing wrong with exceptions for this exact reason: errors are so common that a function being "pure" is the exception, and that errors-as-value handling invariable turns into an endless chain of something like "if err; return (nil/zero, err)" in every language which tries it.
The same would apply to anytime you have Result types - ultimately its still just syntactic sugar over "if err then...".
What's far more common in real programs is that an error can occur somewhere where you do not have enough context to handle or resolve it, or you're unaware it can happen. In which case the concept of exceptions is much more valid: "if <bad thing here> what do I want to do?" usually only has a couple of places you care about the answer (i.e. "bad thing happened during business process, so start unwinding that process" and many more where the answer is either "crash" or "log it and move on to the next item".
Exceptions can be bad if done the wrong way. But the solution isn’t to not deal with it and put it on the programmer. That’s laziness.
The problems are that the signature of functions doesn’t say anything about what values it might throw, and that sometimes the control flow is obscured — an innocuous call throws.
Both of these are solvable.