Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MrBuddyCasino 4 days ago
> That said, I've spent too much of my life chasing implicit control flow to accept exceptions.

Yes. This is why unchecked exceptions are annoying. Checked exceptions are a „failed experiment“ anyway.

A result type (or even Go‘s err) with forced error handling meaningfully increases the robustness of a program in my experience.
2 comments
_flux 3 days ago
My view is that Java's checked exceptions failed in big part because Java didn't have type variables back then; after all, polymorphic Result types are not that much different from checked exceptions.

I haven't written any Java since it has gained those, so I suspect there might be other aspects making it awkward. And it still would lack exhaustiveness checking that e.g. Rust has.

link
nu11ptr 3 days ago
Checked exceptions were actually the "right way" to do exceptions (if there is such a thing), the problem was just that developers hated them, but I think that draws the wrong conclusion. That tells me their syntax/usage was seen as too much forced boiler plate making code unwieldy, not that they didn't have benefits for correctness (something often not appreciated until years later).

Unchecked exceptions lead to unhandled exceptions at runtime. We've all seen screens with Java programs running with tons of exceptions in the log, or worse, that crash with unhandled exceptions. This is the result of the unchecked exceptions mess, which is why I won't use languages that use them for routine error handling for anything more than trivial programs.

link
MrBuddyCasino 3 days ago
> developers hated them, but I think that draws the wrong conclusion

Exception handling is just annoying from a syntax perspective. Also checked Exceptions have the problem that they bubble up types that a different layer shouldn’t even be aware of due to exception chaining (cause of a cause etc), unless you carefully re-throw them, which nobody did.

Lower ceremony errors are just better to deal with.

link
nu11ptr 2 days ago
Agreed, I really like Rust's Result type. Go's idea is okay, but they should force you to handle the error.
link