Error handling

Oh, man, my Achilles heel is error handling. So it was with great interest that I read this article about how (not) to do it. It kind of ends up being a long-format advert for Erlang, but that's OK; non-mutable variables are a good way of dealing with exceptions.

What I'd really like to think harder about is to address error/exception handling at the semantic level. Somewhere in there, errors are workflow. They might be really simple workflow, but at least potentially they're a matter of making a bookmark to a record that tripped us up, and doing something about it later.

The notion of saving state is also interesting, as is the concept of transactions as a method of keeping changes in bundles.

At some point, I'd really like to get serious about a uniform way of talking about errors.

Huh. Looks like I was already thinking about this in 2009. Well - to be fair, it was already bothering me in 1989.