[raverbashing]

That's an interesting discussion, and one that will still keep happening.

At a given point, you can handle errors, but there's nothing you can do about them

It's good when languages (and developers) realize there are errors you should handle but there are errors you "shouldn't" because there's nothing you can do but bail out.

[swatcoder]

In almost all cases, there's a more appropriate way to indicate your expectations than using force-unwrap.

Even in those cases where you can't recover from a failure of those expectations, your code will be 1000x more legible if you demonstrate that you understand that the error could exist and what it might represent about the system as a whole. If you want to explicitly fire a fatal error after that because there's no other form of recovery, so be it.

Trying to capture all that in a "!" saves you a few LOC (or worse: minutes of reasoning) now but suggests somebody else might be pulling their hair out in frustration six months later. Please don't do that to someone.

[ctdonath]

"Nothing to do but bail" is very rare, orders of magnitude below the frequency of misused force-unwrap.

[donarb]

I save force unwraps for things that will be caught at develop/testing time, like app images that are supposed to be in the binary or controls that are supposed to be wired up in Interface Builder. Otherwise, for me, using a force unwrap is a code smell.