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Comment by jsty | Hacker News Reader

> Is there anything in Excel itself that behaves like that?

I'd imagine the default error-handling behaviour of 9/10 Excel macros is to throw away data

Oh, my God. "On Error Resume Next" is one of my earliest memories of learning to program for Windows. It never occurred to me that it might result in deaths.

That's an interesting ethical point in CS: sure, you didn't intend the software you hacked together in an afternoon to be used in anything with life-and-death consequences. But that doesn't mean someone isn't going to come along later and use it, without ever even looking at the source, for something very critical down the line.

I wonder how many bleeding edge master branches of GitHub repos, pulled in blindly by someone cobbling something together to meet a deadline, are running in places they probably shouldn't be.

People have died from using unsuitable contruction materials or devices, that were never designed to be used that way.

It's not the fault of the original designer if he was clearly targetting a different purpose.

https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava/wiki/Error-Handling-Oper...

Lots of love for it in Rx

Yes and "on error resume next" is what I usually see in VBA code

Curious, in what context are you all still using VBA?

I, personally, wouldn't use VBA at all, ever. I would only consider Excel and Word for very simple use cases. For example, I refuse to use Word for technical documentation. But Office and Excel are everywhere in large corporates; and simple tactical spreadsheets turn into monsters over time. One former employer had a spreadsheet "application" where triggering a sheet recalc (accidentally) would take out an entire grid of machines. I've never been in any position to stop this stuff from happening.

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