[hawski]

I fully agree with you. Though I would add that it a little depends on the type of program. A CLI program's lazy, but often sufficient way of handling erroneous input are asserts (that are still enabled in release). In GUI app it shouldn't happen.

[sfink]

Yes. I mean, assert spew should probably be maximally informative, which means it's probably going to vomit out a big stack trace. So for heavily used CLIs (especially if the users are other people), it can be nice to handle the bulk of the common errors specifically (by emitting a brief and to the point error message). Bonus points for suggesting a root cause and what to do differently to make it not happen. And this isn't just unnecessary polish -- it's easy for the cause of the error ("/homw/sfink/.config/myapp not found") to get buried in the noise and for the user to not notice when they've fixed one thing and moved on to the next.

But that's only worth it for some CLI tools. For many, I agree that spewing out an assert failure is plenty good enough.