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mathw a day ago

Not having checked exceptions is a huge problem, because then you never know when something might throw and what it might through, and in the .NET world the documentation on that is pretty awful and absolutely incomplete.

But then over in Java world, your checked exception paradise (which it of course isn't because the syntax and toolkit for managing the things is so clunky) is easily broken by the number of unchecked exceptions which could be thrown from anything at any time and break your code in unexpected and exciting ways, so not only do you have to deal with that system you also don't get any assurance that it's even worth doing.

But this doesn't actually mean checked exceptions are a bad idea, it means that Java didn't implement them very well (largely because it also has unchecked exceptions, and NullPointerException is unchecked because otherwise the burden of handling it would be hideous, but that comes down to reference types being nullable by default, which is a whole other barrel of pain they didn't have to do, and oh look, Go did the same thing wooo).

neonsunset a day ago | parent [-]

> in the .NET world the documentation on that is pretty awful and absolutely incomplete.

Depends on the area you look at. Language documentation is pretty good and so is documentation for the standard library itself. Documentation for the frameworks can be hit or miss. EF Core is pretty well documented and it’s easy to find what to look for usually. GUI frameworks are more of a learning curve however.

FWIW many in Java community consider checked exceptions to be a mistake. While I don’t find writing code that has many failure modes particularly fun with exception handling - Rust perfected the solution to this (and the Go way is visually abrasive, no thanks), I don’t think it’s particularly egregious either - Try pattern is pretty popular and idiomatic to use or implement, and business code often uses its own Result abstractions - switch expressions are pretty good at handling these. Personally, I’d write such code in F# instead which is a recent discovery I can’t believe so few know how good it is.