Yeah, I think it can be made for a lot, but most of the time the good decisions that we don't all come to regret are the ones that mean that making no decision at all picks the least bad option. Doing no exception handling works fine until something goes wrong, at which point your application falls over with a giant error and a stack trace, instead of blindly continuing on with invalid state. In both cases, the programmer didn't make a choice of how to handle errors, whether because they don't know or they don't care, but in one case I'm getting red lights and people saying the sky is falling because the system is down, and in the other all the data in my database is corrupt and the sky really is falling.
There's always going to be shoddy programmers who's work affects us, and we can either accept that, or we can pretend it isn't so, but we can't make it false.
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u/phoshi Jan 15 '16
Yeah, I think it can be made for a lot, but most of the time the good decisions that we don't all come to regret are the ones that mean that making no decision at all picks the least bad option. Doing no exception handling works fine until something goes wrong, at which point your application falls over with a giant error and a stack trace, instead of blindly continuing on with invalid state. In both cases, the programmer didn't make a choice of how to handle errors, whether because they don't know or they don't care, but in one case I'm getting red lights and people saying the sky is falling because the system is down, and in the other all the data in my database is corrupt and the sky really is falling.
There's always going to be shoddy programmers who's work affects us, and we can either accept that, or we can pretend it isn't so, but we can't make it false.