[renewiltord]

In general, I agree. You don’t want silent failures. They’re awful and hard to reason about.

> By doing this, you're opening up for the possibility of showing a UI where the name is "". Is that really a valid state for the UI?

But as a user, if I get a white screen of death instead of your program saying “Hi, , you have 3 videos on your watchlist” I am going to flip out.

Programmers know this so they do that so that something irrelevant like my name doesn’t prevent me from actually streaming my movies.

[noman-land]

This is a fine line. If you get a white screen of death you know something is wrong. If the first name is missing it may mean other things are missing and the app is in a bad state. That means the user could lose any work they try to do, which is a cardinal sin for an app to commit.

Context matters a lot. If it's Spotify and my music won't play is a lot different than I filled a form to send my rent check and it silently failed.

[hahn-kev]

Totally agree, I think this is a good place for debug asserts which only throw during development, but fallback in prod builds.

[mystifyingpoi]

> But as a user, if I get a white screen of death

No one suggests hard crashing the app in a way that makes the screen white. There are better ways. At least, send the error log to telemetry.

[pverheggen]

Well, what would be better is “Hi, you have…”, and that would require a conditional, not coalescing.

[polishdude20]

Exactly, something like a name missing shouldn't cause the app to completely error out for the user.

[slooonz]

Yes it should, because hopefully errors are logged and reported and can be acted upon. Missing name doesn’t.

[pitched]

If the error isn’t repairable by the user, blocking them from using the app entirely is mean. If the error screen has a message telling the user where to go to set their name, that’s fine but annoying. If the error screen tells the user they can’t use the app until someone checks a dashboard and sees a large enough increase in errors to investigate, that’s a bigger problem.

[jackblemming]

This reads like a dogmatic view of someone who hasn’t worked on a project that’s a million plus lines of code where something is always going wrong, and crashing the entire program when that’s the case is simply unacceptable.

[mystifyingpoi]

> something is always going wrong

I hate this sentence with a passion, yet it is so so true. Especially in distributed systems, gotta live with it.

[noman-land]

Why not both?

[rustc]

That's how you get this feature: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-bareword-strings.

tldr: undefined constants were treated as a string (+ a warning), so `$x = FOO` was `$x = "FOO"` + a warning if `FOO` was not a defined constant. Thankfully this feature was removed in PHP 8.