▲ | bob1029 7 months ago | |
> Diagnosing errors given stack traces is very easy. This is the most important aspect of exceptions in my view. The line that threw the exception isn't even the part of a stack trace that I find most interesting. The part that is most valuable to me when working on complex production systems are all of the call sites leading up to that point. I remember in my junior years I wasn't a big fan of exceptions. A stack trace would make my eyes glaze over. I would try/catch at really deep levels of abstraction and try to suppress errors too early. It took me a solid ~5 years before I was like "yes, exceptions are good and here's why". I think a lot of this boils down to experience and suffering the consequences of bad design enough times. | ||
▲ | mike_hearn 7 months ago | parent [-] | |
Exception usability is definitely an area that needs work. If you work support for a dev platform for a while, it's a really common experience that people will post questions with a copy/pasted stack trace where the message+stack actually answers their question. You can just copy/paste parts back to them and they're happy. There's too much information and not enough tools to digest/simplify them and people get overwhelmed. Still, better to have too much data than too little. |