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In general, I agree. You don’t want silent failures. They’re awful and hard to reason about. > By doing this, you're opening up for the possibility of showing

In general, I agree. You don’t want silent failures. They’re awful and hard to reason about. > By doing this, you're opening up for the possibility of showing a UI where the name is "". Is that really a valid state for the UI? But as a user, if I get a white screen of death instead of your program saying “Hi, , you have 3 videos on your watchlist” I am going to flip out. Programmers know this so they do that so that something irrelevant like my name doesn’t prevent me from actually streaming my movies.

polishdude20 11mo ago
Exactly, something like a name missing shouldn't cause the app to completely error out for the user.
- slooonz 11mo ago
  Yes it should, because hopefully errors are logged and reported and can be acted upon. Missing name doesn’t.
  - noman-land 11mo ago
    Why not both?
    - rustc 11mo ago
      That's how you get this feature: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-bareword-strings https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-bareword-strings. tldr: undefined constants were treated as a string (+ a warning), so `$x = FOO` was `$x = "FOO"` + a warning if `FOO` was not a defined constant. Thankfully this feature was removed in PHP 8.
  - pitched 11mo ago
    If the error isn’t repairable by the user, blocking them from using the app entirely is mean. If the error screen has a message telling the user where to go to set their name, that’s fine but annoying. If the error screen tells the user they can’t use the app until someone checks a dashboard and sees a large enough increase in errors to investigate, that’s a bigger problem.
  - jackblemming 11mo ago
    This reads like a dogmatic view of someone who hasn’t worked on a project that’s a million plus lines of code where something is always going wrong, and crashing the entire program when that’s the case is simply unacceptable.
    - mystifyingpoi 11mo ago
      > something is always going wrong I hate this sentence with a passion, yet it is so so true. Especially in distributed systems, gotta live with it.
noman-land 11mo ago
This is a fine line. If you get a white screen of death you know something is wrong. If the first name is missing it may mean other things are missing and the app is in a bad state. That means the user could lose any work they try to do, which is a cardinal sin for an app to commit. Context matters a lot. If it's Spotify and my music won't play is a lot different than I filled a form to send my rent check and it silently failed.
- hahn-kev 11mo ago
  Totally agree, I think this is a good place for debug asserts which only throw during development, but fallback in prod builds.
pverheggen 11mo ago
Well, what would be better is “Hi, you have…”, and that would require a conditional, not coalescing.
mystifyingpoi 11mo ago
> But as a user, if I get a white screen of death No one suggests hard crashing the app in a way that makes the screen white. There are better ways. At least, send the error log to telemetry.

polishdude20 11mo ago

Exactly, something like a name missing shouldn't cause the app to completely error out for the user.

slooonz 11mo ago
Yes it should, because hopefully errors are logged and reported and can be acted upon. Missing name doesn’t.
- noman-land 11mo ago
  Why not both?
  - rustc 11mo ago
    That's how you get this feature: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-bareword-strings https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-bareword-strings. tldr: undefined constants were treated as a string (+ a warning), so `$x = FOO` was `$x = "FOO"` + a warning if `FOO` was not a defined constant. Thankfully this feature was removed in PHP 8.
- pitched 11mo ago
  If the error isn’t repairable by the user, blocking them from using the app entirely is mean. If the error screen has a message telling the user where to go to set their name, that’s fine but annoying. If the error screen tells the user they can’t use the app until someone checks a dashboard and sees a large enough increase in errors to investigate, that’s a bigger problem.
- jackblemming 11mo ago
  This reads like a dogmatic view of someone who hasn’t worked on a project that’s a million plus lines of code where something is always going wrong, and crashing the entire program when that’s the case is simply unacceptable.
  - mystifyingpoi 11mo ago
    > something is always going wrong I hate this sentence with a passion, yet it is so so true. Especially in distributed systems, gotta live with it.

noman-land 11mo ago

This is a fine line. If you get a white screen of death you know something is wrong. If the first name is missing it may mean other things are missing and the app is in a bad state. That means the user could lose any work they try to do, which is a cardinal sin for an app to commit. Context matters a lot. If it's Spotify and my music won't play is a lot different than I filled a form to send my rent check and it silently failed.

hahn-kev 11mo ago
Totally agree, I think this is a good place for debug asserts which only throw during development, but fallback in prod builds.

pverheggen 11mo ago

Well, what would be better is “Hi, you have…”, and that would require a conditional, not coalescing.

mystifyingpoi 11mo ago

> But as a user, if I get a white screen of death No one suggests hard crashing the app in a way that makes the screen white. There are better ways. At least, send the error log to telemetry.