Why do Java people frequently consume exceptions silently?

Question

I never did any serious Java coding before, but I learned the syntax, libraries, and concepts based on my existing skills (Delphi & C#). One thing I hardly understand i

Answer 1

From experience, Swallowing an exception is harmful mostly when it's not printed. It helps to bring attention if you crash, and I'll do that deliberately at times, but simply printing the exception and continuing allows you to find the problem and fix it, and yet usually doesn't negatively effect others working on the same codebase.

I'm actually into Fail-Fast/Fail-HARD, but at least print it out. If you actually "Eat" an exception (which is to truly do nothing: {}) It will cost someone DAYS to find it.

The problem is that Java forces you to catch a lot of stuff that the developer knows won't be thrown, or doesn't care if they are. The most common is Thread.sleep(). I realize there are holes that might allow threading issues here, but generally you know that you are not interrupting it. Period.