[rkagerer]

Back in my VB6 days, I created a custom error handling framework to provide something like try/catch semantics. Part of the toolkit was an IDE extension which added (or stripped) line numbers and boilerplate entry/exit code to functions.

It was game-changing to be able to immediately pinpoint most issues right down to the line number (especially along with the stack trace I generated). Could never understand why we didn't have more languages that let you do that.

And before HN chastizes me... I did try several other third party error handling frameworks first (some very expensive) - they were all buggy and crap, that's why I rolled my own. Even brought that tech along to some clients I consulted for a decade later and it helped devs speed up debugging their enterprise software.