Topic 24 | Dead Programs Tell No Lies |
Have you noticed that sometimes other people can detect that things aren't well with you before you're aware of the problem yourself? It's the same with other people's code. If something is starting to go awry with one of our programs, sometimes it is a library or framework routine that catches it first. Maybe we've passed in a nil value, or an empty list. Maybe there's a missing key in that hash, or the value we thought contained a hash really contains a list instead. Maybe there was a network error or filesystem error that we didn't catch, and we've got empty or corrupted data. A logic error a couple of million instructions ago means that the selector for a case statement is no longer the expected 1, 2, ...
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