OK, I thought you were taking exception(har har) to the name length, not to the fact that such an exception subclass was being used rather than simply filling in a description.

However, even then I think it's not quite so simple. In most cases simply putting in a text description for the exception would be sufficient, given language support when catching should it be needed. But if the application at a higher level needs to know what went wrong in order to inform the user in a friendly way, you'd need some kind of mapping between the exception and what to display on the screen. And if your app is internationalized, simply displaying the description of the exception would be even more problematic, especially if you have the same exception being thrown from different places (in which case you need to make sure none of their descriptions differ by even a single character lest you destroy the i18n mapping). I couldn't say definitely that subclassed exceptions would be superior in this case, but one could make an argument in favor.