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> This is exactly why it's good. How did we manage to get this far before people went insane decided that this is somehow favourable?

> This is exactly why it's good. How did we manage to get this far before people ~~went insane~~ decided that this is somehow favourable?

mindwok 4y ago
After working in an SRE-type role on a codebase full of unchecked exceptions, or exceptions that are caught at the wrong levels because programmers just want their code to work - forcing the explicit handling of errors is favourable because it requires developers to think about what they really want to happen when something goes wrong at this point in the code. Whereas without it, often they will simply catch the exception and continue on silently, or re-raise it without proper context. Conversely, sometimes there are really simple cases that are totally ignored by programmers because they forget that an exception might be thrown. The worst offender in my experience is in Python where people assume the existence of dictionary keys and get KeyError exceptions, or NoneType exceptions. Without type hints, there's no mechanism to warn you as you write the code that these things could occur. So programmers don't plan for it. If there are explicit errors, the programmer is forced to consider the case that the key they want doesn't exist, or that this variable isn't actually the type they expect (static typing helps here too). In general, I think this prevents footguns when you are working on large programs. It's worth the verbosity.
- MrYellowP 4y ago
  See, you perfectly explain why this is the completely wrong approach. You have a headache and take painkillers, believing it's going to cure it. No, it doesn't cure the headache, it just masks it out. The cure is teaching people how to actually program the machines. That's all it takes. Decades of abstraction and piling up more and more nonsense eventually led to the situation we are in now, where people praise bullshit which wouldn't be necessary if people had actually learned how to program the machine and how to do it properly. Instead people need more and more help to do even the simplest things because they've never learned how to do things the right way. So now idiots require tools preventing them from making mistakes they wouldn't be making if they were properly educated!

> This is exactly why it's good. How did we manage to get this far before people ~~went insane~~ decided that this is somehow favourable?

mindwok 4y ago

After working in an SRE-type role on a codebase full of unchecked exceptions, or exceptions that are caught at the wrong levels because programmers just want their code to work - forcing the explicit handling of errors is favourable because it requires developers to think about what they really want to happen when something goes wrong at this point in the code. Whereas without it, often they will simply catch the exception and continue on silently, or re-raise it without proper context. Conversely, sometimes there are really simple cases that are totally ignored by programmers because they forget that an exception might be thrown. The worst offender in my experience is in Python where people assume the existence of dictionary keys and get KeyError exceptions, or NoneType exceptions. Without type hints, there's no mechanism to warn you as you write the code that these things could occur. So programmers don't plan for it. If there are explicit errors, the programmer is forced to consider the case that the key they want doesn't exist, or that this variable isn't actually the type they expect (static typing helps here too). In general, I think this prevents footguns when you are working on large programs. It's worth the verbosity.

MrYellowP 4y ago
See, you perfectly explain why this is the completely wrong approach. You have a headache and take painkillers, believing it's going to cure it. No, it doesn't cure the headache, it just masks it out. The cure is teaching people how to actually program the machines. That's all it takes. Decades of abstraction and piling up more and more nonsense eventually led to the situation we are in now, where people praise bullshit which wouldn't be necessary if people had actually learned how to program the machine and how to do it properly. Instead people need more and more help to do even the simplest things because they've never learned how to do things the right way. So now idiots require tools preventing them from making mistakes they wouldn't be making if they were properly educated!