On 7/11/2018 3:24 PM, crimaniak via Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Wednesday, 11 July 2018 at 18:27:33 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
... application exiting asserts in production. Yes, you kill the
app. You exit as fast and often as the errors occur. You know what
happens? You find the bugs faster, you fix them even faster, and the
result is solid software.
You mean that the serious consequences of errors better motivate
programmers? Then I have an idea. If you connect the current to the
chairs of the developers, and with each failed assert the programmer
responsible for this part will receive an electrical discharge, the code
will surely become even more reliable. But I want the error found in the
production not to lead to a drop in the service, affecting all the users
who are currently on the site, and this is a slightly different aspect.
Motivation is a part of it, to be sure, but only a tiny part. Asserts
and the heavy use of them changes how you think about system state
validation. Yes, you can do that without asserts but I've found that
when you tend towards system recovery and error mitigation style
thinking you tend to be thinking about getting out of that state, not
never getting into it.
As to applying punishments for errors, that tends to be a bad motivator
too. It encourages hiding problems rather than preventing them.
All in all, I'm mostly presenting anecdotal that embracing the style of
programming you're arguing against has produced very good results,
repeatably, in my work experience.
There's a big topic / discussion area in here about fault isolation. If
you really want things to be able to fail independently, then they need
to be separate enough that faults in one cannot affect the other. Most
languages today don't provide the barriers within a process to have
multiple fault domains. None in the c family of languages does. Erlang
is a good example of one that does. Given the industry and userbase
that uses the language, it's not at all shocking that it too embraces
the concept of fail fast, don't try to recover.
Anyway, this is one of the areas where people clearly have different
philosophies and changing minds is unlikely to happen.
