Reducing Assumptions, Exploding Your Code

middayc

I'm the author. If anyone has any feedback, you are welcome ...

tananan

I generally work on internal-use Python codebases. I would much rather do some basic validation and fail loudly if anything I didn’t account for happens. One of the issues I run into is that agents are predisposed to write extremely defensive, odd-case-handling code, and that makes me recoil when I have to look into it: the SNR ratio is very low. You get a spaghetti that is unlikely to crash, but really hard to extract the gist of. And finding more global bugs can be difficult because what should be structural impossibilities can be coerced into silent skips. The article made me think that maybe what I’d like is a language where validation doesn’t triple the lines of code you have to write.

mike_hock

Yeah, or just let the exceptions bubble up and the boilerplate goes away.