• An Uneducated View of Checked vs. Unchecked Exceptions

    09-27-2009 3:04 AM

    Lately, I've been reading up on the raging debate surrounding exceptions and exception handling.  Specifically, how useful is it that languages like Java have checked exceptions that the caller is forced to handle?  Is it better to eliminate these and have only unchecked exceptions?

    I don't write much Java.  I'm all about dynamic languages (hence the Uneducated tag).  But sometimes I have an opinion on things I don't know a whole lot about.  So here are my thoughts.

    I ran across a proposal to eliminate checked exceptions in Google's experimental noop language.  I think this is a good forum to discuss the issue because the language doesn't have any baggage that comes with worries about backwards compatibility and that type of thing.  We can talk about the problem that checked exceptions try to solve and thus think of new ways to approach that problem.

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  • Does a Complex Web App Really Need Clean Markup?

    07-05-2009 12:31 AM

    I found myself pondering this question today in a response to a status message

    While I do really like the ExtJS APIs the generated markup makes me cry. A button should not be made of multiple 's. #fail

    I had this same gripe a while back when I was hacking facebook with greasemonkey.  I felt like facebook was flouting everything we've learned about web standards and structured content.  Everything is a <div> wrapped in multiple other <div>'s.  In fact, most of the content is generated with Javascript.  With their last major redesign, Facebook eliminated many of the explicit page reloads.  Now they literally pull in the entire page with ajax and regenerate the markup.  And a couple of weeks after I finished my greasemonkey script, they changed the interface again and broke it!

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