In fact I'd argue that crashing is bad. It means you failed to properly enumerate and express your invariants, hit an unanticipated state, and thus had to fail in a way that requires you to give up and fall back on the OS to clean up your process state.
[edit]
Sigh, HN and its "you're posting too much". Here's my reply:
> Why? The end user result is a safe restart and the developer fixes the error.
Look at the thread your commenting on. The end result was a massive world-wide outage.
> That’s what it’s there for. Why is it bad to use its reliable error detection and recovery mechanism?
Because you don't have to crash at all.
> We don’t want to enumerate all possible paths. We want to limit them.
That's the exact same thing. Anything not "limited" is a possible path.
> If my program requires a config file to run, crash as soon as it can’t load the config file. There is nothing useful I can do (assuming that’s true).
Of course there's something useful you can do. In this particular case, the useful thing to do would have been to fall back on the previous valid configuration. And if that failed, the useful thing to do would be to log an informative, useful error so that nobody has to spend four hours during a worldwide outage to figure out what was going wrong.
