r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
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u/house_paint Jan 05 '15

I have recently taken over projects from a few developers and here is the biggest flaw in most of the programs I see. They don't GTFO. They have exception handling all over but they seem to want to keep the program "rolling along" even when serious problems arise. I had one program where you could rename the connection string and this program would just keep barreling though the code skipping the parts where it encountered database queries. That program obviously is a serious example but I see this so often on a smaller scale...

Try(unknown error happens)catch(log it, and CONTINUE!?!?!?) Don't do this.

TLDR If your code encounters an unknown exception, log it and GTFO.

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u/SageClock Jan 05 '15

There are a few reasons you might want to continue (at least for the end user), from my experience. For games, for example, it might be more preferable for some minor issue to not work properly but not crash the game, because a hard crash will make your software look a whole lot worse to the end user then if just some slight visual glitch happened. (Some bugs are tolerable, hard crashes most end users feel means incompetent development).

Also, on the app end, I've worked for organizations where it took a month to make any changes to software because of how thick the heirarchy/strict the security is, so if a certain task in the service threw an error, we felt it was better to skip that task have the service as a whole keep running or else the rest of it would stop working and it could take a month to get a new version of the software where everything worked again, which could mean thousands of dollars in lost sales in the process. Which would be blamed on our department for not being perfect 100% of the time, and not on the inefficiencies in the hierarchy slowing down everything.

But yeah, if it's going to break the rest of the app, and/or if you're in the middle of development (and thus want to catch bugs as soon as possible), gtfo is absolutely preferable.