Don’t Nail Your Program into the Upright Position

Despite my levity, I was actually summarizing a lesson I received at the knee of Dame Bitter Experience herself.

To this end, we intertwined multiple exception handlers. We mixed in Windows’ structured exception handling with the native kind (remember in C++? Me neither). When things threw unexpectedly, we tried calling them again, pressing the parameters harder. Looking back, I like to think that when writing an inner handler within the catch clause of another, some sort of awareness crept over me that I might have accidentally taken a slip road from the motorway of good practice into the aromatic but insalubrious lane of lunacy. However, this is probably retrospective wisdom.

Needless to say, whenever something went wrong in applications based on this class, they vanished like Mafia victims at the dockside, leaving behind no useful trail of bubbles to indicate what the hell happened, notwithstanding the dump routines that were supposedly called to record the disaster. Eventually — a long eventually — we took stock of what we had done, and experienced shame. We replaced the whole mess with a minimal and robust reporting mechanism. But this was many crashes down the line.

He quoted the UI designers’ rule: NEVER LET THE USER SEE AN EXCEPTION REPORT, rather as though this settled the matter, what with it being in caps and everything. I wonder if he was responsible for the code in one of those blue-screened ATMs whose photos decorate the feebler blogs, and had been permanently traumatized.
Anyway, if you should meet him, nod and smile and take no notice, as you sidle towards the door.

By Verity Stob