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Comment by kartickv | Hacker News Reader

Interesting perspective. Are you expressing an opinion about "explicit is better than implicit", or is your point on a different axis?

I suppose concise / implicit is fine when the thing that's being hidden can't go wrong, like in:

[i * 2 for i in 1...10]

The loop counter increment logic can't possibly go wrong, so it's fine to not think about it.

Regarding error-handling, don't you want to think about? If you're calling a() followed by b(), what should you do if a() fails? In some cases, b() shouldn't be called, but in others, it should, like deleting a temp file. And if you have to think about it, it's better to be explicit?

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My preferences are that error handling is expressed in and enforced by the type system (Haskell's Maybe/Either, Rust's Result), that common error handling tasks be supported by the standard library and by specialized syntax when necessary (Haskell's many Monad/Applicative tools, Rust's "?" operator), and that if a developer neglects or chooses not to handle an error that the most likely outcome is that it bubbles up to some kind of top-level crash handler that terminates the current task and produces whatever useful diagnostics are possible (exceptions in many languages).

To put it more simply: yes, the developer should have to think about what they do in the case of an error. And then the amount of work they do -- and the code produced, and thus the work reviewers have to do -- should be proportionate to how unusual the necessary error handling is. When I see explicit error handling, that signals to me "hey, this is an important case that we need to handle in a particular way".

the amount of work they do -- and the code produced, and thus the work reviewers have to do -- should be proportionate to how unusual the necessary error handling is.

Great comment. I would add how unusual _and critical_.

One of the things I love about Python is that while I know errors can occur on practically every statement written, I only have to add error handling for likely / expected / critical errors. Any unlikely errors that occur, even in production, will show a detailed stack trace (lots of context), making them easy to fix.

In my experience, things work as expected 98% of the time. For some software, like a pacemaker, checking the execution of every single line of code and even having redundant error checking is not overkill. For other software, like the backup software I work on, having one customer out of 1000 get a weird error is something I'd rather deal with as a support ticket rather than having to anticipate it while writing code.

Of course error handling is important, but requiring 3 lines of error handling for every 1 line of actual code has kept me from investigating Go to replace Python for HashBackup. I'd love to get the performance increase, but not for a 4x expansion of LOC.

Honestly when I look to rewriting a python thing to be 'faster' either try using PyPy first, or rewrite it in OCaml instead. OCaml is extremely simple, similar to python in a lot of ways (GIL and all), but runs at native code speeds, near C the majority of the work, and super easy to bind to C libraries if you need.

Or try Rust. ^.^

Concise and implicit are kind of different axes. For example, Python's "x += 1" is more concise than AppleScript's "set variable x to x + 1.", but the exact behavior of the statement is just as clear from reading it, so it is no less explicit.

In this case, I don't think anyone is arguing that error handling should be implicit. They're saying there should be an explicit way of saying "handle this error in the common way." This actually makes the distinction between common and uncommon cases more explicit, because their differences aren't buried in boilerplate.

You're using defer to close the temp file either way.

you have 'catch' to handle those cases. Try and catch are easy to notice when scanning the codebase.

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