Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ...
by ethbr1 on Sunday October 22, 2023 @09:23AM
(#37975142)
Over the years, I've internalized a few rules to soften what you point out.
* Understand both the cost of making a mistake and of the process not running. Be aggressive on things that are 'nice to have' or have downstream manual re-validation. Be conservative on things that are 'must have' and immediately effect an outcome.
* First, do not harm -- program defensively and break execution on any violated expectations
* Understandable error messages at the user level are gold. The user has no idea what "schema mismatch" means. They can understanding "Column 3 had unexpected value. Was expecting 'X'. Saw: 'Y'"
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On ugly HTML, that's a bad one, because of how ugly it can get.
* Understand both the cost of making a mistake and of the process not running. Be aggressive on things that are 'nice to have' or have downstream manual re-validation. Be conservative on things that are 'must have' and immediately effect an outcome.
* First, do not harm -- program defensively and break execution on any violated expectations
* Understandable error messages at the user level are gold. The user has no idea what "schema mismatch" means. They can understanding "Column 3 had unexpected value. Was expecting 'X'. Saw: 'Y'"
--
On ugly HTML, that's a bad one, because of how ugly it can get.
I've only done toy work with it, but I hear good things about Beautiful Soup (Python). https://beautiful-soup-4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/