Extreme Precision Programming

What is “Extreme Precision Programming”?  It is a style of programming that aims to perform the intended function, while being very noisy about anything that deviates from the intended mode of behavior.  It is nothing like a complete methodology, but rather a philosophical leaning to guide choices at the implementation level.

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Two Kinds of Exceptions

An exception is a message from the system to the user about something that the program can not handle. There are a couple of main categories of exceptions: environmental and program logic. They warrant quite different treatment.

Catch and Continue @ Apache Chemistry

Guideline #14 is “Never Catch and Continue” referring to the bad habit of catching an exception and then continuing processing as if nothing ever happened.  I ran across some particularly bad examples in the example code at one of the Apache projects.  This is an example of what NOT to do.

Gathering Error Report Information

In the last post, I clarified the Purpose of Error Reporting is to give user/administrators information to solve the problem that they have encountered.  This post outlines a way to gather the best information together for that error message.

#17 Program Logic Error

Not all exceptions are the same, and when writing a program, it is important to be mindful of whether the root cause of an exception is the programmer, or possibly environment or user data.  The latter type of exception can reasonably occur in a production environment, and so needs a translatable message.  But errors of the programmer can not happen in production, and thus should be handled differently.