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by Jim Weirich.
Original Post: Catch Curly Curly
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Java’s checked exceptions are the type of thing that sound good at
first glance, but have seriousl drawbacks in productions use. I was
pleasantly surprised when BruceEckel echoed many of my observations in
his checked exceptions essay.
More recently, Anders Hejlsberg (the designer of the C# language) has weighed in with his
opinions of Java’s checked exceptions.
The throws clause […] requires you to either catch declared
exceptions or put them in your own throws clause. To work around this
requirement, people […] decorate every method with, "throws
Exception." That just completely defeats the feature, and you just
made the programmer write more gobbledy gunk. […]
Yep, that’s me. I use throws Exception a lot.
Anders goes on to comment that the focus is not generally on
handling exceptions, but making your code robust in the presence
of thrown exceptions. And that generally means finally blocks. He
observers that …
In a well-written application there’s a ratio of ten to one, in
my opinion, of try finally to try catch.
Interesting. I wonder how much duplication occurs in all those finally
blocks. That’s why I like Ruby’s ability to abstract the
finally (ensure in Ruby) to one location.
Finally, here’s where I got the title for this blog entry.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this — they
say, "try, da da da da da, catch curly curly." They
think, "Oh I’ll come back and deal with these empty catch
clauses later," and then of course they never do.
I"m not guilty of the catch curly curly syndrome, but I’m not
surprised that its a common problem. Bruce Eckel says it best when he calls
Java’s checked exceptions a failed experiment.
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