Beware the dangers of generic Exceptions

Question

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-2003/jw-1003-generics.html?
What do you think about that article?
I thought that it wasn't quite accurate. The author fails to address GUIs.
// some button was clicked or menu item was selected
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent evt) {
    try {
        // try to open file here
        // try to save file here
        // could run out of memory (Error) or
        // IOException
        // or any other number of exceptions / errors that can't
        // be fixed by the user
    } catch (Throwable t) {
        Window w = SwingUtilities.windowForComponent(this);
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(w, "" + t, "ERROR", JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE);
}

Answer 1

most people agree that catching Exception and
Throwable is usually a bad bad thing,Could you point me to statistically significant survey
where this conclusion was reached?no.. admit i should've prefixed it with something like "in my experience" - is that what you mean?
What does this assertion mean anyway? That randomly
putting try-catch(Throwable) into a program would be
bad thing. I guess that's true. That most appearances
of this construct in a random sample of programs were
in inappropriate places? Hard to say unless you've
done the sampling. That the appearance of this
construct in code written by engineers that I
supervise is usually a bad thing? No way.maybe its down to what kind of things you are dealing with, but taking these forums as a good (informal) example i often see bits of code that are wrapped with "catch(Exception e)" in a way that is almost certainly done just to get round the checked exception compilation errors. Its this that I'd still maintain is acknowledged as a bad bad thing - which is compatible with there being legitimate times when catching a general Exception is the right thing to do*
asjf
*saying that though, its v. rare i come across this - but i'm writing gui/application level code