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

There can be many reasons why one would use catch Exception. In many cases it is a bad idea because you also catch RuntimeExceptions - and well you don't know in what state the underlying objects will be after this happens ? That is always the difficult thing with unexpected conditions: can you trust that the rest of the code will not fail afterwards.

Your example prints the stacktrace so at least your will know what the root cause might have been. In bigger software projects it is a better idea to log these things. And lets hope that the log component does not throw exceptions either our you might end up in an infinite loop (which will probably kill your JVM).