My brother the master coder

July 28th, 2010 · 9:00 am @ Benjamin Tseng - 7 Comments

My younger brother Kevin is not only a great guy with a great sense of humor, but he’s a valued member of the Benchside team. Recently, my new Benchside teammate (and professional coder) Anuraag suggested that I start using the Python programming language’s formal exception handling system to handle errors gracefully rather than rely on Kevin/my cobbled together system of error handling which we pieced together for the purpose of getting stuff done rather than getting stuff done well. Anuraag’s suggestion was not a trivial change, although, admittedly, its something we should do as our code gets longer and more complicated, and when I raised the idea with Kevin, this is how he replied:

Kevin: man i hate exceptions

Me: aren’t u supposed to be the legit pro programmer?

Me: shouldn’t u have figured all this out before?

Kevin: my code doesnt make mistakes

Me: LOL

Kevin: thats why i dont need them

Sadly, while Kevin might not mistakes, I almost certainly do .

Tags: Benchside, brother, exception, Kevin, personal, programming, Python

Bhan

I was waiting for the part where you said he's single and likes long walks on the beach.
http://blog.benchside.com Eric

I have mixed feelings about exceptions. They interrupt the programming flow in the same way as goto statements, and it makes it hard to predict what will happen in the program.
http://www.benjamintseng.com/ Ben

He can write his own personals…
http://www.benjamintseng.com/ Ben

It depends on how you use them (I don't think the flow is interrupted too badly if you leave the try, except blocks as far out as possible) — but on my end they're useful as they allow me to communicate more information on what sort of errors the backend encounters (e.g. is this a database error vs. something else)
http://blog.benchside.com Eric

I think the flow is interrupted more if you have the blocks as large
as possible. I'm talking about following logical/execution flow. If
you have more blocks, at least you stay local. Also, exceptions (at
least I've heard) can seriously hurt performance in that you jettison
the CPU pipeline; this is less of a problem in the parallel processing
present, but probably still important.

Some APIs pass back error variables (by reference or by multiple
return statements). Perhaps we should, too.

– Eric
http://www.benjamintseng.com/ Ben

You can take that up with Anuraag — I'm going to go with his opinion until I hear otherwise.
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My brother the master coder

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