Opinion: Developers, silently swallowing errors is not OK

I don’t know if it’s considered some sort of modern trend, but what is it with applications now that just swallow errors instead of dealing with them? Is there an edict within these companies that errors should get shown, so they can argue their app doesn’t have errors?

I’m working with a SaaS app right now. It does editing. Sometimes when I save, it just doesn’t save. No error, just nothing saved. Or every now and then, I find the order of what I’ve entered just gets changed. Again, no error, but the order was changed.

Worse, sometimes when I then try to correct the order, it shows it as done, but next time I go back to that screen, the order is back the way it was in the first place.

On many occasions, if I close my browser, open it again, and log in, it all works OK again for a while.

But it’s not just these types of applications. I’ve lost count of the number of sites I’ve been to, where supposedly serious applications are being developed, yet the code is full of try/catch blocks but the catch blocks are empty ie: silently ignoring any errors that occur.

How did we get to the point that this is what passes for application development now? Apps that mostly work and fail silently?

Sorry, but this is not OK.

2019-01-08