Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

A library knows what happened, but not what to do about it. It doesn't know who the caller is. It could be an interactive user or a microservice RPC or a Spark job or a debugger.

There have been frameworks like the Common Lisp Condition System to let a caller dictate a recovery/retry policy, but they never caught on. In practice "do no harm, give up, and report the error" is what almost everyone wanted, and most languages support it without punitive effort.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: