Eric_Lippert writes on his blog about different types of exceptions: fatal exceptions, boneheaded exceptions, vexing exceptions, exogenous exceptions and how to handle them.
at the core this is about exceptions being used for exceptional circumstances:
- fatal exceptions: can't handle, let crash - important to avoid silent corruption, which is way worse than a crashed program (don't catch)
- boneheaded exceptions: those are bugs in your code and you should fix the code instead of handling the exceptions (don't catch, fix)
- vexing exceptions: are due to poor design decisions - an exception is thrown where it none should have been thrown (use alternatives if possible)
- exogenous exceptions: due to factors outside of your control (always handle)
in my opinion, this is one of the important principles to observe when writing robust code, together with making illegal states unrepresentable.