pp. 76-77 of Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" talk about the issues with boilerplate try-catch. He basically does not approve, as they make readability suffer and often do not do what they advertise (truly catch errors.) I don't know how he would feel about production assertions, but I'm guessing he would buy into it if it helps reduce complexity. In the sense of finding remedies to troublesome bugs--which will occur.
