Error handling done properly.

Last week I almost lost my belief in everything..

A friend of minde, he's currently learning programming (Delphi 😂) in some kind of university, just told me:
"Hey, why do you spend so much time caring about error handling? I just surround all my programs with one try catch block and I never have to think about errors!"

Ehm. No statement needed, right?

What if all that was that easy !! :-P

Maturity is transitioning from throwing errors to catching them.

What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.

I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.

So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.

So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.

After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.

Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.

I heard scary thing.
A tester found an issue yesterday. He came to the dev and reported about it. Apparently the only feedback message was "something went wrong". They spend almost an hour hunting down the cause for that. It turned out the error message was from one of the try-catch. I do not know much details apart from that. At the end, the dev lead said this (which he had said before).

"That's why I don't like to catch exception."

*Senior Dev:* Ah yes, we need to put try-catch in every function to handle errors and Logger.Log() at the beginning.
*Me:* Is not better to define a global error handler and use the stacktrace instead of doing all that?
*Senior Dev*: ...
*Senior Dev*: Is a rule here, do what I'm telling you.

App fails, Check logs...No error logged. Check source code and debug....
And then you see following piece of code....

try{
//Code to hit an API
}catch(Exception ex){
/*DO NOTHING. Not even log stack trace*/
}

Not quite a interview question, but in a competition (I had build a compiler) the jury (they all told me they had all studied informatics) asked me what a compiler is... Not in a "lets try to catch him off manner" but rather in a "i am too stupid for this world manner" he asked me what a compiler was... And it got even worse: my compiler is based on linuxes utils (nasm+ld) the guy didnt know about linux. Assembler was much too much for him and when my compiler threw an error (I wanted to show them the error system) he told me I shouldnt present unfinished projects... Atleastthe other two were really nice and i still got 2nd place (behind a person who prorammed an Nxt thingy)

A piece of code someone just pushed:
In pseudocode
------------------------
Function foo()
Result = GetFoo()
If result != null
DoStuff()
Return result
Else
Result = null
--------------------------
Ffs.

It's written in a strongly typed language, and the whole function is in a try with an empty catch and inside yet another try with an empty catch. Guess he wanted to be sure no error got away....
Oh, and he has 9 years of experience, and since all paths don't return something it does not compile

When you've spent hours debugging a problem of session not being saved and there is no error. And then you find this in the code:

try{
save_session();
}catch(Exception $e){}// added by another member of the team

🙈😖🖕🏻

I started learning Golang today and really like it.

The error handling is *excellent*. It always works the same way and is standardized, unlike the hell that NodeJS error handling is (.catch(), try).

Modules confused the fuck out of me. I eventually figured out how they worked, but Go really doesn't try to make it easy to have multiple source folders...

I'll probably be re-writing my Discord Bot in Golang soon. Being able to have just one binary output will make things infinitely easier. Compile-time variables are another feature that's nice and easy to implement.

The goal is only having to upload a single binary to deploy on production from my CI script that has all keys and stuff inside. Feels good to finally throw all that old bad JS code out and starting completely fresh.

Found this on fb~

OK people, I don't need a novel written for every line of code, but PLEASE STOP trying to tell me that "yOuR coDe sHouLd bE sELf dOcUmeNtiNg aNd cOmMenTs mEaN iT's aUtoMaTiCaLLy bAd". That's a bunch of BS. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've saved my own butt by dropping a "this call can't be awaited; causes the library's internal API to throw an error" comment in my C#, or a "can't use double quotes here; doesn't work right for some reason" line in my JavaScript. Sometimes there are very good but un-obvious reasons why something was done a certain way, even though it looks like it could be done better. And don't try to tell me "the tests will catch it". Let's be realistic here, nobody has 100% test coverage on any project that's much more than "Hello World". And even if the tests DID catch it, why waste the time when you could just write a comment?

P.S.: This is not directed at anyone on here specifically. It's directed at all the devs I've met IRL and the comments I've seen on SO, who think that comments must be bad.

No error handling at all, not even a single try catch. Program crashes when the wind changes direction. Previous developer developed his test plan around his bugs. 😭

A dev found a bug I created where I set a SQL parameter name to @OrderID instead of the expected @Order. The standard is @OrderID, there is one stored proc where it's @Order.
Oops...I didn't catch it because the integration test didn't cover that area of the code. My mistake...I should have checked...I take complete responsibility for the screw up.

He let me know by email..
"When refactoring, from now on check the stored procedure parameters, there are a few that don't follow the standard."

I was like "from now on..."? ...wow....bold comment from someone responsible for code that doesn't check for nulls, doesn't log errors, and relies on exceptions for flow control. You wouldn't even have known about the error if I didn't modify your code to log the error (the try..except returned false)

I really wanted to reply ...

"Fixed. From now on, when you come across those easily found bugs, go head and fix it, write a test, and move on. Don't send a condescending email to me, my boss, your boss, all the DBAs, and the entire fracking order processing team. Thanks."

But..I thanked him for finding and letting me know...we're a team..blah blah blah..

Frack..people suck.

I am learning java at school and my teacher asked me to make a work on JTA (java transaction API). There's not a lot of tutos on it on the web so I say to myself "go on, give it a try, you'll only learn by trying."
I finally find how to make the @TransactionType, where to put the @Stateless, my test works, nice. Finally I want to try a case where it shouldn't work, just to be sure the rollback works well. The test goes and... NullPointerException. Wtf ! Normally, my catch is supposed to, well, catch the error !

And finally, I was just stupid. My catch worked great. But I put a "throw e" inside.

Now I wanna hides under blankets, cry, eat cake and never see my coworkers again.

! Rant

Quick tip for those of you struggling with a error or bug you can't fix.
But that doesn't effect functionality.
Just wrap the code inside a try catch block and don't do anything inside the catch 😂😂. Saved me a lot of hours in my projects.

Nah I'm joking. Don't ever do this

try{
// some code
}catch(Exception ex){
MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
}

even in Visual Studio

My job environment is either fucked up or am too young to understand what a job life is.
I was hired to intern for a startup having 2 main bosses/founders . one of them is mostly administrative and comes to office daily. He sets some tasks and i have to complete them, as soon as possible or sometimes till a deadline. He has little knowledge about the complexity of wotk so usually he says "just complete it as soon as possible so we could release it" but we haven't pushed any updates since i joined (of course i have completed some tasks, but they are just not pushed to the release version)

The other one , as i ranted previously is a completely different story.I think he is an elder bro or senior of the other boss,but he is just a superman: dealing with the distributers, commanding the hardware ppl, discussing with the othr boss, handling the server and most importantly the guy who wrote all the code i am working on. So he comes extremely rarely(1 or 2 days / week) , tries to communicate with me , but is immediately diverted by some other call/person and goes away.

The problem is : am feeling a little helpless. They give me tasks and i start working on them with excitement .( I don't believe myself to be a terrible beginner: i have been learning/working on android development for past 1 year, i know my things. And even if i don't, i know how to search/debug and produce results) . So as usual, i start and try to apply my skills / search for things i don't / try to understand his large,overwhelming and confusing codebase and at the end am stuck at some point where i don't understand what to do next. Sometimes its a bug which doesn't seems to fix, sometimes its a thing thats in the codebase but i couldn't find or sometimes it's just something i couldn't seem to understand why isn't it working. At that time, I only wish that boss to be here and look at what and how i have done, if its a correct approch and how can we together take it to completion (or simply wtf am i doing wrong, see my shit and tell me) .

But again, the tech boss is busy or wouldn't have time to understand my problem in our short , incomplete meetings. But he or the nontech boss will definitely have the time to ask the sttus of project and pressurise for the "deadline" .

Like today, i was so stuck at this fucking one line error that i couldn't detect that i just messaged him that am leaving for home 3 hours early. He came running and for the first time in history gave me a complete undisturbed time. It was such a small mistake, but i wasn't able to catch on my own. But when i told him, he immediately caught , changed a single line and the code started to work.

I am feeling irritated. Is this all a correct environment?

What's your opinion on the error-value vs try-catch debate?

I'm usually on the error-value side of things.
Its the preferred error-handling in Go and the pretty much only decent solution in C.
Also, frequently thrown exceptions seem to impose a larger overhead than the constant checking of the error-value.

I'm freaking out. The snack bar is shown in every non iOS device...
On iOS the error never get caught 😖 and the try/catch won't work too.

A time I (almost) screamed at co-worker?
Too many times to keep up with.

Majority of time its code like ..
try
{
using (var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
// data access code that does stuff
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// Various ways of dealing with the error such as ..
Console.WriteLine("Here");
ShowMessage("An error occured.");
return false;
// or do nothing.
}
}

Range of excuses

- Users can't do anything about the error, so why do or show them anything?
- I'll fix the errors later
- Handling the errors were not in the end-user specification. If you want it, you'll have to perform a cost/benefit analysis, get the changes approved by the board in writing, placed in the project priority queue ...etc..etc
- I don't know.
- Users were tired of seeing database timeout errors, deadlocks, primary key violations, etc, so I fixed the problem.

On my tip of my tongue are rages of ..

"I'm going to trade you for a donkey, and shoot the donkey!"
or
"You are about as useful as a sack full of possum heads."

I haven't cast those stones (yet). I'll eventually run across my code that looks exactly like that.

Be me, get a consultant job, go to a supposedly great client that has fame of getting scouted by Google. (attn: I doubted all this shit before I started)

Learn the basics by a awesome mentor and trial/error stuff at the same time to get the hang of things, after that was done, I noticed there was no documentation whatsoever, code is spaghetti and your documentation, good luck!

Royal spaghetti, you can't make heads or tails of it, dev code in production, empty try/catch blocks, empty statements, if (true)... (incl. their core classes)

Keep in mind this is a multi milion dollar company...

Someone please understand my pain...

"Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation"

This error message pisses me off. I know the SSIS Script component is capable of catching exceptions, you can wrap all your code in a try/catch (please don't) and get an exception. So would it be so hard that if the Script Component throws an exception that it tells me what it is instead of sending me on a goddamn scavenger hunt?

The whole bullshit system of errors is why I hate SSIS. Just tell me what went wrong.

I did what I wasn't supposed to do, wrapped it in a try catch and it gave me a stack trace and an error message and all sorts of actionable shit. But why the hell can't it just do that on its own?

There is literally nothing worse, except maybe Hitler, than a goddamn vague error message.

I'm still using .then().catch() instead of the async await.
So, first of all, Fuck you for calling it a STANDARD now. its nowhere near to be called standard. You wanna get some data from an API? Wanna call it using axios or fetch? What if the server is down? what if there's an error that you don't even know existed? Where do I get that kinda error in async await? try-catch? no thanks :| I'm good -_-

My dev teacher for mobile was teaching us react native. I got an error while compiling it (missed a try catch in a function). My teacher only looked at my code and I hear her say to herself "no semycolon missing" and then she says to me, I don't know what's wrong...

Like... Are you seriously a teacher?

I usually just block every possible entry point of errors instead of handling them directly with try-catch or on-error callbacks. Is that a good practice?

In case you ask, yes, i am that lazy.

You are mine! :D

I should try to put ascii arts of pepe memes instead of meaningful error handling messages in my code, this way I would know for sure if people are actually not just patching fucking try catch silence everywhere instead of doing proper code.

I should probably do the same with documentation as well while being at it.

Today I had to fix a bug and it took me about 2 hours to find out that it related to a bug in a component which doesn't belong to the bugs component. In development everything where fine. But after deployment the bug occured. Found out that when running Vue webpack projects in dev it handles errors different, kind of a global try catch block. After deployment the application breaks.
This teached me again that we should not ignore any red error line in console.

PHP is awesome, but it annoys me that there is no typing and that you still can get errors based on types...
Other than that, not being able to catch all errors in one catch and especially not being able to natively catch fatal errors is my biggest problem...

(not natively meaning that you can use hackish solutions but there's no "fatal error" class to use in your try catch, and you're using the register shutdown function not as intended...)

It's funny how alcohol actually makes you remember all the crazy shit you had to deal with.

As when I was a junior c# programmer at an ERP shop.

I was new, naive and full of energy.

I used to dive deep into the code base, and one of the things I noticed but didn't pay too much attention was.

Error stacks were usually meaningless.

And why was that?

First, well it was c#.

Second, the guys use to do this.

try {
ThrowingFunction();
} catch (Exception e ) {
throw e;
}

PS: I'm not doing c# anymore, that was 10 years ago. So syntax might be a bit off.

The most excited was probably when I had to write a Visual Basic program with a try/catch statement that took user input and would send a “You Done Messed Up!” Popup Error message in the catch. For some reason it was sending it anyways even after the input was correct. Took me an hour of debugging to find out it was my logic that was wrong. Finished the assignment 5 minutes before it was due. I celebrated as if I had just won the World Cup.

Is it just me or is the error handling in Go and/or Rust just.. tideous?

Maybe I'm biased because I grew up on C# and error handling has always been Exceptions and try+catch for me, but I find having to manually check errors everywhere not only annoying to code, but also horrible to look at.

Am I alone on this one?

try{
If(!res || typeof res == undefined || res == undefined){}
}catch(err){
// you just had to throw an error
}

So the saga of broken fucking everything continues at work, and I'm managing it, effectively, and doing it correctly on the first go-round. It's a long process though, because the two retards who preceded me were equally inept for completely different, yet equally disruptive and destructive reasons. The first dude was just plain psychotic, probably still is. I'd post some of his code, but I don't want anyone's face to melt off like those Nazi dudes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can handle it because I'm constantly inebriated, which is not as fun as it sounds. If you have to ask yourself if you can handle it, you probably aren't, unless you've had to Uber to/from work due to still being fucking drunk. Anyway, enough about that, and it was only like twice. The rest of the times, I was more blazed than Jerry Garcia at a weed smoking contest. Moving along.

UPS shipping labels broke two weeks ago, I fixed it, but these fucking 10xers jointly decided to not only never implement anything resembling error handling, other than EMPTY GOD DAMN "try/catch"es (empty catch, wow so efficient), and instead of using COMMENTS, which I know are a new thing, they'd wrap blocks of code in something like: if 1 = 0 {} FUCK YOU DICKFACES. As I was saying before I got emotional again, they tied the success to all kinds of unrelated, irrelevant shit. I'm literally needle/haystacking my way through the entire 200GB codebase, ALONE, trying to find all the borked things. Helpfully, my phone is ringing all the time from customer service, complaining about things that are either nothing to do with the site, or due to user stupidity, 75% of the time.

A certain department at my company relies on some pretty specific documents to do their job, and these documents are/were generated from data in the database. So until I can find and fix all of the things, I've diverted my own attention as much as possible to the rapid implementation of a report generation microservice so that no one elses work is further disrupted while I continue my cursed easter egg hunt from fucking hell.

After a little more than two days, I'm about to lauch a standalone MS to handle the reports, and it's unfortunately more complicated than I'd like, because it requires a certain library that isn't available on Winblows, so I've dockerized the application. Anyway, just after lunch, I've finished my final round of tests, and I'm about ready to begin migrating it to the server and setting up (shitty fucking shit) IIS to serve it appropriately. At this point, this particular report has been unavailable by web for about 8 days.

A little after lunch, and with no forewarning of any kind, the manager of managers runs upstairs and screams at me to "work faster" and that "this needs to be back online RIGHT NOW", but I also know that this individual is going to throw a fit if things on this pdf aren't a pixel perfect match. So I just say "that's some amazing advice, I wish I'd had the foresight to just do it better and work faster". Silence for a good five seconds, then I follow up with "please leave and let me get back to my work". At that moment from around the corner, my "supervisor" suddenly, magically even, remembers that he has had the ability to print this crucial, amazingly super fucking important document all along, despite me directly asking him a week ago, and he prints it and takes it where it needs to go. In the time that it takes him to go to that other department and return, I deploy my service.

I spent the rest of the day browsing indeed and linkedin jobs, but damn this market is kinda weird right now, yeah?

"Please provide steps to reproduce" seems to be the catch-22 when people try and kick up a fuss about a bug I'm certain doesn't exist.

It's funny because then they report the bug, they word it like I've ruined their life, that can simply cannot continue to function until this error is fixed, yet those simple magic words "Provide steps to reproduce" seems to put their prioritise back into perspective or at the least scares them back into the void from which they came.

One of the worst practices in programming is misusing exceptions to send messages.

This from the node manual for example:

> fsPromises.access(path[, mode])

> fsPromises.access('/etc/passwd', fs.constants.R_OK | fs.constants.W_OK)
> .then(() => console.log('can access'))
> .catch(() => console.error('cannot access'));

I keep seeing people doing this and it's exceptionally bad API design, excusing the pun.

This spec makes assumptions that not being able to access something is an error condition.

This is a mistaken assumption. It should return either true or false unless a genuine IO exception occurred.

It's using an exception to return a result. This is commonly seen with booleans and things that may or may not exist (using an exception instead of null or undefined).

If it returned a boolean then it would be up to me whether or not to throw an exception. They could also add a wrapper such as requireAccess for consistent error exceptions.

If I want to check that a file isn't accessible, for example for security then I need to wrap what would be a simple if statement with try catch all over the place. If I turn on my debugger and try to track any throw exception then they are false positives everywhere.

If I want to check ten files and only fail if none of them are accessible then again this function isn't suited.

I see this everywhere although it coming from a major library is a bit sad.

This may be because the underlying libraries are C which is a bit funky with error handling, there's at least a reason to sometimes squash errors and results together (IE, optimisation). I suspect the exception is being used because under the hood error codes are also used and it's trying to use throwing an exception to give the different codes but doesn't exist and bad permissions might not be an error condition or one requiring an exception.

Yet this is still the bane of my existence. Bad error handling everywhere including the other way around (things that should always be errors being warnings), in legacy code it's horrendous.

I only catch errors so I can throw them myself.

I spent three days debugging an API endpoint because in this framework, a "function not in scope" error fails silently. The only way to find out that this issue was happening was to drop the entire endpoint handler into a try/catch block.

Guys.
JavaScript is the shittiest fucking language.

How do you handle error checking? I always feel sad after I add error checking to a code that was beautifully simple and legible before.
It still remains so but instead of each line meaning something it becomes if( call() == -1 ) return -1; or handleError() or whatever.
Same with try catch if the language supports it.
It's awful to look at.
So awful I end up evading it forever.
"Malloc can't fail right? I mean it's theoetically possible but like nah", "File open? I'm not gonna try catch that! It's a tmp file only my program uses come oooon", all these seemingly reasonable arguments cross my head and makes it hard to check the frigging errors. But then I go to sleep and I KNOW my program is not complete. It's intentionally vulnerable. Fuck.
How do you do it? Is there a magic technique or one has to reach dev nirvana to realise certain ugliness and cluttering is necessary for the greater good sometimes and no design pattern or paradigm can make it clean and complete?

If you gona reference a web.config key in your code, wrap it in a try/catch and throw a useful error, for fuck sake!

Compare and harmonize the web configs

Oh no someone set execution timeouts to 14 days

Fuck fuck fuckity duck

Hey compare all the web configs of all environments and harmonize them all wtf cmon bruh do your job as a developer

Take them and back them up into svn. What do you mean svn isn't a back up system of course it is well its the only thing we have fuck

What do you mean we have shit logging where people will catch an exception and only print the word exception in the log you can figure it out can't you we have live produxtion issues that hace to be solved now what the fuck

How dare you make a. Mistake copying our shitload of a bloated codebase and configuring our 100s of different options all by fukcing hand what the fuck dude do yoh write anyrhing down?

Please catalogue all the exception mails we are getting but we have no db or error reporting system so they all just plop into tue inbox and thats all ypur fuckjng data figure it out kid

This is a rewarding, fulfilling job whwrw you can be both dev ops and a developer and manage all of our fucking environments of which there are about 15 of all your own with no sort of tool or software to aid you because haha what the fuck we wouldn't make your life easy

Whata that you want to spend time to write stuff or change stuff that will nake it easier fot you fuxk that bruh get back to your biklable tasks like holy shit you thjnk this is a charity ofr aomw shit

Live production issues
Live production issues
Produxtion issues. A ghost in the machine. Find it fix if find it fix it find it fix it cmon why can't you fix it I expect you to spend your day hopelessly pretending to try to solve something you fucker

One of the only peopel able to help you sometimes though hes a bit of an old laxky, yeah hea fucking leaving see ya seeya kid and now we're not hirinf anyone to fuckjng help you no no no managing and monitoring the environments its your jov alll fof them every sngle on do you knkw all the xonfiguraiton values for them yet??

Instead we are hiring a new sales person to fucking make us some more money and we don't need naother seceloper to help you infqct lets have you use this mid end retail computer from 2014 to develop on yeah yeah oh but all our shitty code and visual studip will destry your memory but too bad!! Hahahahahdhsj

Go lice is all you, why sare you so slow

How long will it take
How long will it take
How long will it take
How long witll it tqk2
How long will it take holy shit
Give time estimate for sonethign that I don't fucking know how about it will tqke till fuxk you oxloxk