[arrowsmith]

How are there three different types of exception?

As for "two string types" maybe I'm not working on hard enough problems, but in ~4 years of Elixir I've never once needed to use a charlist. My understanding is that it's a backwards-compatibility thing from Erlang and I'm not even sure when I'd ever need to use it over a string.

[hello_computer]

raises, throws, & exits. rescue vs catch. as for binary vs charlist, some dependencies wanted binary, others wanted charlist. faced with the choice of re-write the dependency to use binaries, or wrap it with pre/post converters, we chose the latter. after the third or fourth global search-and-replace thanks to elixir's renaming of built-ins just for the hell of it, we re-wrote it in go, and never looked back.