Re:Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
by ethbro on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @02:29PM
(#13698850)
Is there a functional difference between "my production code suddenly stopped processing work because it rejected a newly nullable input value" vs "my production code suddenly stopped processing work because it crashed on a newly nullable input value"?
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Re:Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
by protomyth on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @02:39PM
(#13698992)
If the crash gives an attack vector for a security threat then there is.
Personally, "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" is a bad policy in the modern world. It should be "Be conservative in what you do, be strict as if you don't trust them in what you accept from others".
Re:Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
by ethbro on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @02:51PM
(#13699168)
That's a valid point if it's security-critical. My initial response was with regards to grandparent comments arguing over semantics, when the end results in both cases was "successful processing ceased because of an API change."
Re:Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
by yawaramin on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @03:03PM
(#13699316)
'Liberal in what you accept from others' in this case would mean being prepared to handle nullable JSON fields.
Re:Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
by klodolph on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @03:01PM
(#13699297)
Ideally it's more like "my production code skipped over 1% of batch jobs because it didn't expect the null values" or something like that. Handling errors gracefully is a bit of an art unto itself.
Re:Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
by perfmode on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @03:19PM
(#13699463)
Indeed it is an art.
Re:Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
by noir_lord on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @03:12PM
(#13699398)
production code that rejects a suddenly nullable input value is more deterministic than "something crashed" and can be handled better (triggering a watchkeeper, notification) rather than relying on someone paying attention to the crash logs.