Friday 11 November 2016

More on the sad state of checked exceptions


Following on from my previous post about Java Lambdas and checked exceptions I did a bit more research.

I found a revealing analysis of what github programmers do when exception handling. 
As far as I am concerned it goes to demonstrate the failure of Java’s attitude to checked exceptions.


This is well worth a read; it would seem that most developers do not respect checked exceptions at all, typically ignoring them entirely or doing nothing more than logging and swallowing.

Take a look at figures 7 and 8 of the report. Clearly a lot of catch blocks are entirely empty, however what about the ones that do a bit of printing/logging? They looked closer and found that typically when either logging/printing take place then these are typically the only operations done in the catch; so only a tiny bit better than an empty catch block.

It is hard to believe that in the vast majority of cases it is really acceptable for a program to carry on without taking any action – however that’s what we see across github. 

Quality software!

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