lad

Are we still talking about COBOL?

To be fair, I disagree with all the points author makes, except for performance which is important but may be less important than code clarity in different cases. I am surprised that exceptions perform that well, and I am surprised the author said that compared C++ exceptions to Rust results, but actually did the right thing and compared C++ exceptions with C++ expected first. I thought it was going to be one of those “let’s compare assembly to lisp”

Yeah, I shaped my words poorly. What I meant is that errors are sort of equivalent to exceptions, but errors are first class citizens of type system, and this is an improvement over exceptions being kind of independent of type

Have you ever worked at large old corporation? Wasting money is a bit of an underestimation on that scale.

Also, not all banks use COBOL, but the ones that don’t are usually much younger.

Besides, Ada would’ve been a better example, as it is used by telecoms and seems to be held in high regard, unlike COBOL. The only issue with Ada I heard of is that it’s on par with C++ in complexity which is far from being simple.

I’m just going to ask, without making assumptions. Have you managed to cut some time to read the article and find an answer?

you never know what code your function or library calls that can produce an exception

As far as I remember, there were several attempts at introducing exceptions into type system, and all have failed to a various degree. C++ abandoned the idea completely, Java has a half-assed exception signature where you can always throw an unexpected exception if it’s runtime exception, mist likely there were other cases, too.

So yeah, exception as part of explicit function signature is a vast improvement, I completely agree

I feel like this will have zero protection against

if (result.isSuccess()) {
    handle_error(result.error);
} else {
    do_something(result.value);
}

Besides, this is exactly what the comment said about having to constantly check for return values at call site. I think this may be mitigated by some clever macro-magic, but that will become a mess fast.

I don’t know the answer to your question, but I think that what is needed is just a bit of syntactic sugar, e.g. Rust has ? for returning compatible errors without looking into them. That seems to be powered by Try trait, that may be a monad, but I am not fluent enough to check if it formally is.

It’s used because the ones who use it have enough money to pay for any problems that may arise from it’s use, and known problems are deemed better than unknown ones.

It is a viable model when you have enough money and resources, but a conservative one

it’s one of the most popular languages used for C/C++ build scripting

Unfortunately 😅

That way we’ll just find maintainers went near extinct over time, just like COBOL developers that are as rare as they are expensive. Only Linux kernel isn’t a bank, and maybe will not have as much money to pay to rare developers capable of maintaining C codebase

The hard part is “that add value”. Not only it’s hard to measure, but highly depends on scope of what is done

Cosmic balance, sort of 😅

I forgot that last time was in 2023, although the previous one was in 2016. SO had a lot of moderation drama and point-grinders that (imo) led to community becoming more toxic, to the point where it’s not too pleasant for me to participate in.

To be fair, they still have some good answers, and sometimes they can provide a useful answer, but edge-case rare obscure problems that seemed to be the very reason for SO are rarely answered now, as I see it

Sort of, but e.g. in case of MacOS you’ll have some apps that can’t be installed as Nix packages and some things that can’t be configured in OS

Also was not mentioned, since every dependency is unique you should have no trouble discerning versions that look the same, but in fact configured different or depending themselves on different versions of things, and introducing breakages that way. If you find that some specific configuration of dependency is causing you trouble, you can switch to a different one even if another package depends on this troublesome version.

Ach, well, a known method to create a nice discussion

only one man understood that thing

You will not, indeed, it’s going to be abstractions all the way down from now on

It’s easier to fix bugs that you just introduced to be able to cover that KPI, too 🌚

True, there is a spectrum of options, and some will work much better than what we have now. It’s just that when I read about holding people accountable I don’t quite imagine it’s going to be implemented in the optimal way, not in the first hundred years or so