Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Proprietary software be like:
try:
whatever()
except Exception:
print("oops something went wrong uwu")
print("also this is purely to get rid of the stack trace because apparently the only thing worse than not handling an exception is scaring the user with anything technical and/or exposing our trade secret architecture")I use the catastrophe theory of error handling: if something fails sanity checks or throws an exception, then kill it with fire: crash the whole program and make the users cry.
True, it’s a pain but.. no more hidden errors that get reported two years later
actually a really bad idea if you're doing anything with critical data between your systems and other systems, like a credit card getting charged on a remote server but then your code crashes
Dev mode is when developing by the programmers. Production means used by others.
When I am working with a service, I want to know immediately when there is a problem.
When I push my code to be used, the dev flag is off and the code does stuff as normal.
For example: if I am making a payment service using a third party, I use sandbox and fake cc numbers. I want things to fail loudly on my computer so I can make things fail silently. And safely, when it’s used with real money. But I can only do that if I know there are issues. And only logging lets some bugs be unnoticed , particularly if a cluttered log. So being loud in development saves tears in production
I agree in general, that a crash is much better than silently failing, but well, to give you some of the nuance I've already mostly figured out:
All good points!
Also, I’ve learned from others that how you crash depends on the environment, if running in dev, be different than if the thing is used by the public or in production.
formatting edit
Increasingly so, the more experienced I get...
Knowledge is a curse!
The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know.
When I graduated with my bs in programming I thought I had at least a little knowledge of most programming
Years later, I can safely say I know very little, maybe aware of 1% or 2% of just the names of the major parts of tech in programming . Details even less.
And I read a lot
print "error \n"
There, handled.
Currently implementing error handling for a library I'm building and the process is basically to just throw all of the information I can find into there. It makes the error handling code quite verbose, but there's no easy way for me to know whether the underlying errors expose that information already, so this is actually easier to deal with. 🫠
Thank you, I hate it when libraries fail and don't give me good info, like failed to load doesn't help, failed to load because of syntax error on line 45 of input is soooo nice when that happens.
I appreciate verbosity. It’s much nicer than the opposite.
Maybe one more log output would fix it…
Welcome to the second part of the Dunning Kruger wild ride of software.