Also, something I wrote over on Hacker News yesterday which, having slept on it, still feels punchy enough to throw into the ring:
Panics are overgrown ASSERTs, not an underbuilt exception system.
-- Stephan Sokolow @ > Did Rust end up with both errors and panics because the community suppressed r... | Hacker News
(As the summing up of my perception of how panics organically became exception-like.)