I don't think options really serve the same purpose as exceptions. If you have are just passing up None or whatever up the call stack over and over again, you probably should just be using an exception. If not, then options are fine. I use options for normal behavior (a missing file, for example) that perhaps can be corrected or handled in a different way. I throw an exception if I want to just crash the program. I rarely ever try catching exceptions, except in maybe some top level driver function. Oh and to all the programmers out there who wrote the code I'm currently dealing with: please don't use exceptions for flow control, it's a terrible terrible idea.
That means those events that are very far from the happy path and need to be recovered by unwinding down multiple function calls until a safe point to recover gracefully is reached. These are events such as failing to allocate memory.
