Failing Nicely

From Larry Osterman, a notion that application resilience is sometimes not good. This is all well and good, but I there's a distinction I wish he drew. And that is this:

Not catching is different from not showing.

The point of the post is that you don't want to catch (and hide) your failure because you're likely to fail again later and debugging is a LOT harder. This is true.

But

You should still avoid showing the end user an exception; those tend to cause panic. Instead, provide a good error message to the user and fail appropriately.