When Things Go Wrong
One of the more troublesome parts of creating good quality software is how we handle problems that interrupt the “happy path”. Exacerbating this problem, most of our design methodologies don't seem to offer much advice on the topic. In this session we'll investigate some general categories of failure and consider the macro behaviors that are appropriate to each and where–in terms of the call stack–those actions should be taken.
The discussion will compare the strengths and weaknesses of the most common ways of representing failure: sentinel values, exceptions (both Java's checked variant, and the more common unchecked approach), and the functional technique based on monads. Along the way, we'll consider the abstraction of error, the consequences of getting this design aspect wrong, and how the design of our APIs might make errors less common in the first place.
About Simon Roberts
Simon Roberts wrote his first program in 1978 in high school on punched cards. He started his career as a programmer building embedded control systems in a variety of assembly languages, C, and C++. Alongside programming, Simon taught part-time at a local college. In 1994 his career transitioned to full-time teacher and part time programmer, and he joined Sun Microsystems in 1995 where he worked until going independent in 2004
While at Sun he created training courses on a diverse range of Java topics, developed the original Sun Certified Java Programmer and Developer exams, and presented at JavaOne and other conferences on Java and Java performance topics.
Today, Simon is president of Dancing Cloud Services, LLC., based in Westminster Colorado, and he provides training, course development, and mentoring services in Java, Scala, JavaScript, Python, Go, along with design, and software architecture topics. Simon is equally comfortable offering training in classroom, recorded video, and live, remote-access, formats.
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