Re: Developing frameworks and applications in tandem and managing dependencies

StackExchange etc. is definitely not a conversation site.  It's an answer my problem site.  I like discussions, but I haven't much time for them, so I didn't chime into this conversation til now.  


I'm with Joel on this one.  It seems to me errors should be handled explicitly where possible, and exceptions tend to make a lot of the handling implicit, as in something handles them, but much of the code pretends they don't exist - which can be dangerous.

 
Alan Baljeu


From: John Elliot <[email protected]>

To: [email protected] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 6:37:00 PM
Subject: Re: [OT] Developing frameworks and applications in tandem and managing dependencies
 

  
On 2012-08-01 08:22, Richard Howells wrote:
>>> If it wasn't for you I wouldn't have had anyone
>>> to talk to! It saddens me that this list is so dead these days.
> 
> I think StackOverflow has cleaned up in the market for straight Q&A.  That's taken a lot of the traffic that used to happen here.

I've never had much to do with StackOverflow. I was stuck with a gnarly
IPSec networking problem and asked over there but my question got closed
and I was referred to StackExchange. There was one helpful person at
StackExchange but in the end my problem remained unresolved. Apart from
that I've bumped into threads there from time to time when searching the
web for some thing or another. Basically it just doesn't feel like
something I want to be involved in. For instance getting "status points"
for being more or less helpful, I don't like the idea of introducing and
codifying class systems into a conversation or a community (to the
extent that it can be avoided).

I guess I value Q&A, but I value discussions and opinion too. It's
normal in a conversation your have in RL to begin talking about one
thing and end up talking about something else entirely. That's what I
like about conversations, and that's why I like the idea of OT lists.

On a totally different topic (heh) here's an article by Spolsky that I
read for the first time today:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2003/10/13.html

He's against the use of exceptions. I kind of agree with him that
error/exception management is kind of an unsolved problem, in the sense
that there's no one true way to do it, nor in fact any way to do it
which doesn't suck in one way or another.