[theamk]

I don't understand why people insist that all errors must be handled all the time. It could be my C++ background, but I feel there are two very different errors:

Expected errors - like "user not found" - should use a value instead of exception. In Python, you can use sentinel objects, or tuples, or None.. lots of options really. Occasionally there is a good reason to use exceptions for flow control even for know errors (various hooks come to mind), but this should be pretty rare compared to number of places that can raise an unexpected errors.

Unexpected errors should not be caught at all, except maybe at the very top level (to record them and return 500 to user). The examples in post, where you catch exception and re-raise Exception back are terrible - what's the point of them? There is no extra clarity, just verbosity. I would defect them in any code review.

Coarse-grained error handling is great as long as exceptions are meaningful and stack traces are good, which is the usual case in python. All that matters for unexpected errors is that (1) user sees an error message and (2) the real cause is recorded for later analysis. A single top-level try block does both.

[danpla]

> Expected errors - like "user not found" - should use a value instead of exception. In Python, you can use sentinel objects, or tuples, or None.. lots of options really.

That's why exceptions are called exceptions, not errors. If a routine called openFile() can't open a file, that's a pretty exceptional situation, and it's up to the caller to decide whether the exact reason is an error in their case.

The exception object is already a value that can have not only a message text, but also any data members, so why reinvent the wheel with sentinel objects, tuples, etc.?

> The examples in post, where you catch exception and re-raise Exception back are terrible - what's the point of them? There is no extra clarity, just verbosity. I would defect them in any code review.

Typically, you re-raise an exception after adding some content to it. This may be less important in Python, which gives you a great stack trace, but in a language like C++, the lack of context information makes the exception basically useless.