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    You wrote: Throw soon,... Catch soon...! Why? That's a completely contrary approach in contrast to "throw early, catch late." Commented Mar 3, 2014 at 13:46
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    @shylynx I don't know where "throw early, catch late" comes from, but its value is questionable. What, exactly, does catch "late" mean? Where it makes sense to catch an exception (if at all) depends on the problem. The only thing that's clear is that you want to detect problems (and throw) as early as you can. Commented Mar 3, 2014 at 13:56
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    I assume "catch late" is meant to contrast the practice of catching before you can know what to do to fix the error -- e.g. sometimes you see functions that catch everything just so they can print an error message and then rethrow the exception. Commented Mar 4, 2014 at 19:10
  • @Hurkyl: A problem with "catch late" is that if an exception bubbles up through layers that know nothing about it, it can be difficult for code that might be in a position to do something about the situation to know that things really are as expected. As a simple example, suppose if a parser for a user document file needs to load a CODEC from disk and a disk error occurs while reading that, code which calls the parser may act inappropriately if it thinks there was a disk error while reading the user document. Commented Jun 25, 2014 at 15:06