This is surprising to me. As a self taught hobbyist (crap) programmer that doesn't try too hard to make 'good' code. It nevertheless seems obvious to me that y

This is surprising to me. As a self taught hobbyist (crap) programmer that doesn't try too hard to make 'good' code. It nevertheless seems obvious to me that you'd want to deal with the errors first. I kind of disagree with the articles Pareto principle. 80% of programming is working out all the ways that things could go wrong, so it's better to think about those first, rather than getting into to juicy bits and leave the error handling for 'later' Maybe it was from my ASM phase, and wanting to avoid the extra branch? Or maybe it's because 'professional' programming is more cargo culting than we'd like to admit?