The primary point of friction is semantics. Many developers abuse exceptions and throw them at every opportunity. The idea is to use exception for somewhat exceptional situation. For example, wrong user input does not count as an exception because you expect this to happen and ready for that. But if you tried to create a file and there was not enough space on disk, then yes, this is a definite exception.
One other issue is that exceptions are often thrown and swallowed. Developers use this technique to simply “silence” the program and let it run as long as possible until completely collapsing. This is very wrong. If you don’t process exceptions, if you don’t react appropriately by freeing some resources, if you don’t log the exception occurrence or at least not notify the user, then you’re not using exception for what they are meant.
Answering directly your question. Exceptions should rarely be used because exceptional situations are rare and exceptions are expensive.
Rare, because you don’t expect your program crash at every button press or at every malformed user input. Say, database may suddenly not be accessible, there may not be enough space on disk, some third party service you depend on is offline, this all can happen, but quite rarely, these would be clear exceptional cases.
Expensive, because throwing an exception will interrupt the normal program flow. The runtime will unwind the stack until it finds an appropriate exception handler that can handle the exception. It will also gather the call information all along the way to be passed to the exception object the handler will receive. It all has costs.
This is not to say that there can be no exception to using exceptions (smile). Sometimes it can simplify the code structure if you throw an exception instead of forwarding return codes via many layers. As a simple rule, if you expect some method to be called often and discover some “exceptional” situation half the time then it is better to find another solution. If however you expect normal flow of operation most of the time while this “exceptional” situation can only emerge in some rare circumstances, then it is just fine to throw an exception.
@Comments: Exception can definitely be used in some less-exceptional situations if that could make your code simpler and easier. This option is open but I’d say it comes quite rare in practice.
Why is it unwise to use them for control flow?
Because exceptions disrupt normal “control flow”. You raise an exception and normal execution of the program is abandoned potentially leaving objects in inconsistent state and some open resources unfreed. Sure, C# has the using statement which will make sure the object will be disposed even if an exception is thrown from the using body. But let us abstract for the moment from the language. Suppose the framework won’t dispose objects for you. You do it manually. You have some system for how to request and free resources and memory. You have agreement system-wide who is responsible for freeing objects and resources in what situations. You have rules how to deal with external libraries. It works great if the program follows the normal operation flow. But suddenly in the middle of execution you throw an exception. Half of the resources are left unfreed. Half have not been requested yet. If the operation was meant to be transactional now it is broken. Your rules for handling resources will not work because those code parts responsible for freeing resources simply won’t execute. If anybody else wanted to use those resources they may find them in inconsistent state and crash as well because they could not predict this particular situation.
Say, you wanted a method M() call method N() to do some work and arrange for some resource then return it back to M() which will use it and then dispose it. Fine. Now something goes wrong in N() and it throws an exception you didn’t expect in M() so the exception bubbles to the top until it maybe gets caught in some method C() which will have no idea what was happening deep down in N() and whether and how to free some resources.
With throwing exceptions you create a way to bring your program into many new unpredictable intermediate states which are hard to prognose, understand and deal with. It’s somewhat similar to using GOTO. It is very hard to design a program that can randomly jump its execution from one location to the other. It will also be hard to maintain and debug it. When the program grows in complexity, you just going to lose an overview of what when and where is happening less to fix it.