I’ve never really had much of an opinion about error handling. This may come as a shock to people who know me as quite opinionated (in a good way!), but yeah. If I was coming into an existing code base I just did whatever they did before, and if I was writing from scratch I just did whatever felt right to me at the time.

When I recently read the error handling section in Clean Code by Uncle Bob, that was the first time I gave the subject any thought at all. Sometime later I ran into a bug which was caused by some code failing silently, and I realized it might be time to think about it a bit more. I might not be able to change how errors are handled in the entire code base I’m working on, but at least I would be informed on what approaches exists and what the tradeoffs are, and, you know, have an opinion about the matter.

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