I kind feel that declining try/catch is aligned with the baleful eye cast on Bob. The language designers think Bob is going to use try/catch to foist error handling on someone else or for later which never comes. And so error handling will then end up slightly broken to totally broken. So they'd rather when Bob's writes code with error paths that he to deal with that then and there. Not 'elsewhere' 'later' or make it 'someone else's problem'