How you will do error handling and exception handling in that case? If there 1 chance per million that something will work incorrectly due to solar radiation or power fluctuation, how much such temporary failures you will see when your system handling more than 100 millions of requests per day? If you restarted database and all connections to database are broken, should all your current users see 500 error code?
PS. That is real story. ;-)
PPS. I used RecoveryManager to handle errors in the my system. It is very simple: when it receiving an error, it uses it configuration to determine action to take (e.g. call helper method) and responding to caller with code to indicate what caller should do: throw exception to higher level or just try again for few times.
When an exception occurs and the system goes down, you get a nice notification and a stack trace. From there you can actually go about fixing the problems created by those hordes of crappy Java programmers rather than just ignoring the problem and hope that nobody will notice.
Now, granting that people like that are even paid to write code, do you think they're allowed to work on systems that ship widgets or cause money to change hands?
Frankly, we're having an absurd discussion because the assumption introduced by the original article is absurd. Nobody programs that way, or rather the few people who program that way can't be made productive through any means short of torture.
