Re: Try/Catch
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jan 08, 2015
- 5526 views
From the perspective of the IDE writer, it's easy to anticipate a badly written plugin (perhaps still in beta) crashing and throwing a Throwable. But this can be handled - catch the Throwable and maybe disable/unload the plugin. And pop up a message box so the bug can be reported from the user to the developer of the bad plugin.
Since this bug is already catch in a very elegant way, the user don't even bother to report it; he simply continue his work and this bug will last another few years (as I've seen in many programs).
If the IDE would have crashed, I bet that this plugin would have fixed or removed much quicker. Personally I don't bother to report a bug unless it really bothers me (if the program crashes). And there are so many bugs out there.
On the other hand, the user - after seeing the error crash the IDE - might decide that it's better to move on to another product where this doesn't happen. In any case, forcing users to become assistant developers (by forcing them to write out bug reports) is probably not a best practice... like in Matt's real life example, I'm sure those users have better things to do.
As an experienced user, I save and backup my work frequently. I guess any programmer does. Automatic backups are common option in editors, since the developers are realistic after all.
Definitely a sound practice.
