If you're rethrowing the exception, what happens in the VM if that exception is not caught?
IIRC, the VM exits, so, it's not at all identical. There are potentially severe nonlocal effects and you're already coding defensively by putting a catch/rethrow.
As far as I know, you didn't get a supervisor for free in Elixir either, you decided to use one, and spent some time determining how to configure it to recover from its child processes failing. In Java, you can similarly put a try/catch at a higher level in the call tree and decide to retry everything on error. Now, Erlang processes don't share state, so that makes them easier to "handle" when they crash, I'm not denying that. My point was more that "try" can be as ergonomic as "with".
The re-throw was just to mimic your Elixir example. Normally I'd just let exceptions that shouldn't be handled at that level bubble up the call tree to wherever it makes more sense for it to be handled.
Now, I'll admit, most Java code I've seen professionally use exceptions badly, in that they tend to be overly aggressive and defensive, try-catching everywhere at all levels when they should just let things bubble up as appropriate. I believe that's just a general misunderstanding though. Often it is caused by Java's use of CheckedExceptions, programmers just try/catch to make the compiler error go away, when they should just re-declare the exception since it doesn't need handling most of the time, or re-throw a runtime error if they don't care to have compile time checks for handling them.
When I code in Java, I barely ever try/catch anything. Normally I have one try/catch around my main method which can recover the whole app from any error, and from there, if there are smaller process trees that can be recovered independently at their level I sprinkle a few more try/catch in those places.
P.S.: I also don't want to get into too many details, but the VM actually doesn't crash, Java will call your UncaughtExceptionHandler for any given thread that crashes, the default one performs a System/exit in error state, but for a server app for example, you'd handle it.
