Question: I often see comments on other Stack Overflow questions about how the use of `except: pass` is discouraged. Why is this bad? Sometimes I just don't care what the errors are and I want to just continue with the code.

```
try:
    something
except:
    pass

```

Why is using an `except: pass` block bad? What makes it bad? Is it the fact that I `pass` on an error or that I `except` any error?

Answer: 
Simply put, if an exception or error is thrown, something's wrong. It may not be something very wrong, but creating, throwing, and catching errors and exceptions just for the sake of using goto statements is not a good idea, and it's rarely done. 99% of the time, there was a problem somewhere.

Problems need to be dealt with. Just like how it is in life, in programming, if you just leave problems alone and try to ignore them, they don't just go away on their own a lot of times; instead they get bigger and multiply. To prevent a problem from growing on you and striking again further down the road, you either 1) eliminate it and clean up the mess afterwards, or 2) contain it and clean up the mess afterwards.

Just ignoring exceptions and errors and leaving them be like that is a good way to experience memory leaks, outstanding database connections, needless locks on file permissions, etc.

On rare occasions, the problem is so miniscule, trivial, and - aside from needing a try...catch block - **self-contained**, that there really is just no mess to be cleaned up afterwards. These are the only occasions when this best practice doesn't necessarily apply. In my experience, this has generally meant that whatever the code is doing is basically petty and forgoable, and something like retry attempts or special messages are worth neither the complexity nor holding the thread up on.

At my company, the rule is to almost always do *something* in a catch block, and if you don't do anything, then you must always place a comment with a very good reason why not. You must never pass or leave an empty catch block when there is anything to be done.
​Handling errors is very important in programming. You do need to show the user what went wrong. In very few cases you can ignore the errors. This is it is very bad programming practice.