Is “throws Throwable” good practice

Question

In the past I\'d read tons of code with methods like:

public Object doSomething() throws Throwable {
    ...
}

Is it common practice to do

Answer 1

Functionally, it is equivalent with throws Exception, since errors are unchecked.

I see no reason to declare a method to throw Throwable. However, this doesn't mean that catch and printStackTrace is a good alternative.

Usually, you want to catch throwables where you can do something sensible with them.

Code that throws a throwable you don't expect should explode gloriously, so you can see the error and fix the bug.