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A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.
Jason was investigating a bug in a bitmask. It should have been set to 0b11, but someone had set it to just plain decimal 11. The line responsible looked like this:
Sep 24byte number = (byte) 11;
The power of exception handling is that it allows every layer in our stack be notified of an error condition, do something about it, and pass it on if necessary.
For example, if you have a data access layer and a query fails, you may catch the exception and potentially retry there, only passing the exception up the stack after a few failures. Or, you may fail to connect, updates some internal status variables to represent that you're in an invalid state, and then pass that exception up the stack.