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Artima has an interview with Bertrand Meyer where he goes into exception handling. Meyer, for all his erudition, seems to have no real familiarity with dynamic languages (Smalltalk, Lisp, Ruby, Python, etc):

The exception mechanism in Eiffel is quite different from those that exist in other languages, and it surprises many people. When you have an exception in Eiffel, you only have two ways of reacting to it. The reason that you only have two ways is that exceptions are something that you don't want to see happening. So it's quite different from the approach that says exceptions are special cases that we are going to expect and process in a special way. In Eiffel, exceptions are really a sign that something quite wrong has happened, so you have only these two ways of reacting. One is to accept that you can not do anything better, and to just pass on the problem up to the next routine up the call chain, which of course will be faced with the same dilemma. That is often, especially for operations deep down in the call chain, the only real world reaction, because the operation does not have enough context to do anything smarter. The other reaction is, if you actually do have some elements that enable you to think you're smarter, to attempt to fix the condition that led to the exception and try the same operation again after correcting the context. This is the kind of mechanism that provides direct support for what I was calling software fault tolerance, and I think it can be quite effective provided it's used with reason, that is to say, not as another algorithmic mechanism, but as a mechanism of last resort

Somehow, I doubt any Smalltalkers are surprised (we have a fairly rich exception framework, and one I take good advantage of in BottomFeeder). I guess Meyer's world view goes as far as the C language family and Eiffel - and no further....