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The blog references Spolsky who has marked it expired. Perhaps he has changed his mind.

Problems with error codes:

Too easy to ignore.

Errors and normal return codes get mixed.

Often difficult to pick a distinguished error value, 0, -1?

Problems with exceptions:

Too easy to ignore. How often do you find empty exceptions?

Too many types of exceptions, The Java libraries are particularly guilty of this.

Adding a checked exception can break code all over the universe.



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