> FWIW, my take is that they are largely equivalent except for more or less syntactic support for the approach.
Yeah, as with lambda calculus and turing machines, they are equivalent in capacity.
> Are we comparing the same things? Adding exceptions to the method signature is pretty explicit to me too.
Maybe, maybe not. IME the IDE support for exceptions is quite a bit worse than for returning results and such.
> I do find your point about exceptions being for unexpected things interesting: basically, split errors into two classes and use separate mechanisms for each.
> I generally feel that this differentiation would never hold between different codebases (an HTTP library may consider network error something "normal", but users of that library might consider it exceptional), but it's surely an interesting concept.
Isn't the two ways to handle it already a thing with checked and unchecked exceptions, though? As in having wrappers that convert one to the other.
> I also think that we as developers are pretty bad at handling both expected and unexpected errors, so having two mechanisms will only make us less likely to do so (not by much, though).
I don't quite agree with that, as with encoding it in the type system conveys more intentionality than with exceptions, IMO.
