I prefer return values over exceptions in languages that make it safe and easy.
Haskell does a pretty good job, I think.
With Maybe or Either, you have to check it to extract your value, but if you are doing a lot of things that will result in/use the results of Maybe/Either, you can just operate in a Monad that makes them the default.
Similarly, languages with multiple return values make you explicitly ignore the return value.
Exceptions have their benefits, but I have a personal preference for return values because they make it explicit in the interface. Also, I find that it makes more sense to handle various success and failure scenarios in the same bit of code instead of writing a best-case flow and assuming that exceptions will be thrown and errors will be dealt with somehow.
Exceptions are great if you can't continue due to programmer error, but most cases where people use exceptions are just expected execution paths that (in my view) make no sense to handle via non-local control flow.
Haskell does a pretty good job, I think. With Maybe or Either, you have to check it to extract your value, but if you are doing a lot of things that will result in/use the results of Maybe/Either, you can just operate in a Monad that makes them the default.
Similarly, languages with multiple return values make you explicitly ignore the return value.
Exceptions have their benefits, but I have a personal preference for return values because they make it explicit in the interface. Also, I find that it makes more sense to handle various success and failure scenarios in the same bit of code instead of writing a best-case flow and assuming that exceptions will be thrown and errors will be dealt with somehow.
Exceptions are great if you can't continue due to programmer error, but most cases where people use exceptions are just expected execution paths that (in my view) make no sense to handle via non-local control flow.