[flowerlad]

> Can you please elaborate how the pattern that you describe doesn't pass the buck to a portion of code that has less context for the cause of the failure?

Copy/pasting another person's answer:

You could wrap every line of Java code in a try/catch if you wanted to (it wouldn't be idiomatic, but it's definitely possible). You're just not forced to.

You can handle some of the exceptions in the same function, without going to the extreme of wrapping every line of code in a try/catch block.

[unscaled]

> You could wrap every line of Java code in a try/catch if you wanted to (it wouldn't be idiomatic, but it's definitely possible). You're just not forced to.

Yes you ARE forced to. Unless the exception derives from RuntimeException.