About use of specific error

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Sat Mar 4 02:48:35 UTC 2006


On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 01:37:40PM -0800, tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> On 3-Mar-06, at 12:50 PM, Peter Crowther wrote:
> 
> >> From: stéphane ducasse
> >> In Java you
> >> get really a lot of exceptions everywhere. The comparison is
> >> interesting.
> >
> > Java has had exceptions since the language was devised.  In  
> > Smalltalk, and especially in Squeak, exceptions are recent additions.
> Kinda; exceptions went into ParcPlace Smalltalk in about 1990; I  
> remember spending several weeks implementing the primitives and VM  
> stackhandling support in the BrouHaHa/Archimedes Smalltalk system.  
> Squeak has had the basics of exceptions for quite a while too BUT it  
> doesn't seem that anyone has really bothered to make much decent use  
> of them. It's like proper Closures - we've had code to provide them  
> for ages and yet haven't actually got them into the system properly.

I have a hunch that there is a human factors aspect of this also.
In practice, programming with exceptions seems to attract some of
the worst elements of human (and organizational) behavior.

I recently had the opportunity to be exposed to a Java project
in which the technical leadership proclaimed a requirement for
an "exception framework" and proceeded on that basis of that
"requirement" to produce a truly horrific spaghetti-mess of
slop that allegedly facilitated consistent exception handling.
This may sound like an extreme example, but I suspect that there
is something about clever exception frameworks that just brings
out the worst in human behavior.

Earlier in this thread, Markus Gaelli said "Exceptions are a way of
goto programming and can become quite hairy to use." This seems
about right, and I would only add that, as with all good things,
a little bit goes a long way.

I'm no expert in this stuff, I just can't help noticing that it
seems to attract bad behavior.

Dave




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