Re:Most RESTful APIs Aren't RESTful
by bunderbunder on Friday July 11, 2025 @01:46PM
(#44535063)
I worked at a place that had a really great coding standard for working with exceptions:
1. Catch exceptions third-party code and talking to the outside world right away.
2. Never catch exceptions that we throw ourselves.
3. Only (and always) throw exceptions when you're in a state where you can't guarantee graceful recovery. Exceptions are for those exceptional circumstances where the best thing to do is fail fast and fail hard.
A lot of people just do whatever comes to mind first and don't think about it so they don't get stuck with analysis paralysis.
Handling failure might be the real hardest programming problem ahead of naming and caches and such. It boggles my mind the hate people have for Exceptions which at least make you "try" quite literally if you don't want the system to barrel past failures, some seem nostalgic for errno and others will fight mightily with Either<A,B> or Optional<X> or other monads and wind up just barreling past failures in the end anyway. A 500 is a 500.