Our study results revealed that some developers have shifted their perspective on exception handling from the intended proactive approach (i.e., how to handle possible exceptions) to a reactive approach (i.e., using exception handling as debugging aids). In addition, some developers dislike being forced to implement exception-handling constructs and therefore, neglect to implement them thoughtfully. Both results explain the poor quality of error handling.

I think the authors have an overly optimistic view of what exceptions provide to the system. The vast majority of exceptions are little more than glorified logging aids: they give you a message and might contain a stack trace, but that’s about it. What you can't do (without an awful lot of work) is ascertain enough information to go about a reasonable recovery strategy. In particular, it is rare that the immediate caller of an operation that may throw an exception even has enough information to do anything about it. About the only reasonable thing to do is try the operation again.

Furthermore, is there any reason to believe that developers ever viewed exception handling as proactive? Just because it may have been intended as a way to handle possible problems does not mean that it was accepted (or even presented) as such.

Lastly, I posit that the remark to "implement them thoughtfully" is another instance of "boil the ocean".

(Note: This is what prompted my tweet earlier.)