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What are your programming hot takes? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

What happens when you coerce a string to a date-and-time but it's not valid?

Where I'm from (Rust), error handling is very strict and very explicit, and that's how it should be. It forces you to properly handle everything that can potentially go wrong, instead of just crashing and looking like a fool.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    My point is, you won't ever try. You'd only use "weak" variables inside the function you're working on.

    It's explicit when you absolutely need it to be, when the function is being called and you need to know what arguments to pass and what it'll return

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    A string being parsed as a date-time is presumably user input, which is potentially invalid.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    When you say user, you mean a user of a function? In that case PHP would throw a TypeError, and presumably only happens when developing/testing.

    If you mean in production, like when submitting a form, an Exception may be thrown. In which case you catch it and return some error message to the user saying the date string is invalid.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    By “user” I mean the person who is using the application.

    Using exceptions for handling unexceptional errors (like invalid user input) is a footgun. You don't know when one might be raised, nor what type it will have, so you can easily forget to catch it and handle it properly, and then your app crashes.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    you can easily forget to catch it and handle it properly

    Even if I coded the form by hand and that happened, it's on me, not on the programming language.

    But I don't, I use a framework which handles all that boilerplate validation for me.

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