This doesn't sit well with me. Who is to say what's catastrophic and what's not? Should I use all libraries in fear because passing a nil pointer or an improperly formatted date may cause it to terminate the program with no recourse? Suddenly every library is a ticking time bomb with a scorched Earth policy for things it doesn't like. How am I to know what's going to cause my valuable program to simply die in the middle of the night? Look at the outdated/incomplete documentation? Pore over the complex code (if it's even available)? Now not only do I need to litter error value checks everywhere, but I also need to preemptively sanitize all input to any library calls I make and pray that I haven't missed something. This is simply trading one problem for another.
That's a potential issue with any language, I believe. In Go you can recover() from what would otherwise be a termination. For example, I have a function that grabs and parses RSS feeds. If my program is fed junk by the remote site, I don't want to terminate, I want to ignore the error for that feed (after logging it). To do this I recover() from any error at the feed level.
