Of course. And, sadly, one of those systems I once helped with was built on Javascript, which made the whole thing even sillier.

There you had an exception, resorting to as if Go to convert it to an error, handled as if Go to convert back into an exception, and then, when the exception was caught, it was back to 'writing Go' again to figure what the exception was! At least Java does a little better there, I'll give it that.

It is completely ridiculous. I guess that's what happens when you let bootcamp completionists design software.

If a language really wants to embrace the idea that errors and exceptions are the same thing, fine. Maybe it would even prove to be a good idea. But then we should expect that language to actually embrace the idea. This "errors are exceptions, but only sometimes, because we can't figure out how to represent most errors as exceptions" that we see in Java and languages that have taken a similar path is bizarre – and for developers using the language, painful. That has proven to be a bad idea.