Re:Shell Style Guide
by kemitche on Tuesday May 15, 2018 @12:22PM
(#17075123)
For most scripts, handling file not found isn't gonna happen anyway. Often the result is just printing to standard out "hey I couldn't find file X" then bailing. An uncaught exception works well enough for this in many cases, such as build scripts.
Same goes for permissions issues and a whole slew of similar scenarios. For many use cases, the lack of forced error checking is a feature.
Concrete example: build scripts. As long as the cause of the build failure is clear from the uncaught exception, there's no reason to handle it. I don't need a friendly UI to avoid scaring off non technical users, I just need something that handles the happy path well and crashes with a meaningful stack trace when something unexpected happens.
Same goes for permissions issues and a whole slew of similar scenarios. For many use cases, the lack of forced error checking is a feature.
Concrete example: build scripts. As long as the cause of the build failure is clear from the uncaught exception, there's no reason to handle it. I don't need a friendly UI to avoid scaring off non technical users, I just need something that handles the happy path well and crashes with a meaningful stack trace when something unexpected happens.