First time reading this. It's actually funny how disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now. And writing a new programming language for a certain product, well, it could turn out to be pretty cool, right? It's how we get all those Elms and so on.

That's how we got Rust.

    > disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now

Help me to clarify. Are you saying that when Joel posted (~20 years ago), disliking exceptions was considered crazy? And, now it is normal to dislike exceptions?

Assuming that my interpretation is correct, then I assume that you are a low level systems programmer -- C, C++, Rust, etc? Maybe even Golang? If you are doing bog standard enterprise programming with Python, Java or C#, exceptions are everywhere and unavoidable. I am confused. If anything, the last 20 years have cemented the fact that people should be able to choose a first class citizen (language) that either has exceptions or not. The seven languages that I mentioned are all major and have billions of lines of legacy code in companies and open source projects. They aren't going anywhere soon. C++ is a bit special because you can use a compiler flag to disable exceptions... so C++ can be both. (Are there other languages like that? I don't know any. Although, I think that Microsoft has a C language extension that allows throw/catch!)

I wasn't around back then, but it must've been at least a bit crazy, considering Atwood threw an exception (heh) high enough to write a blog entry about it. What I think has happened is that with functional programming concepts sort of permeating mainstream, and with the advent of languages like Go and Rust (which I wouldn't exactly call low-level, for different reasons), treating errors as values is nothing unorthodox in principle. I'm not sure how real or prevalent this is really, just a guess.

I'm not trying to advocate going against the stream and not using exceptions in languages based around them, but I can see it being pulled off by a competent team, which I'm certain Joel could put together.

It's funny, because this decision by Joel in 2006 prefigures TypeScript six years later. VBA was a terrible bet for a target language and Joel was crazy to think his little company could sustain a language ecosystem, but Microsoft had the same idea and nailed it.