Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Exception handling
Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 9 years (2018–2026), in 7 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Can't tell which functions throw exceptions or what they throwUnreviewed
20182026- Can't tell which functions throw exceptions or what they throw2026-06-14
- Can't tell whether a function call can throw or what exceptions it raises2026-06-13
- Exceptions propagate invisibly, so callers get errors they never anticipated2023-08-18
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 8 complaints
- Can't tell which functions throw exceptions or what they throw2026-06-14
- Can't tell whether a function call can throw or what exceptions it raises2026-06-13
- Programs crash with long stack traces instead of telling users what failed and how to fix it2024-03-06
- Exceptions propagate invisibly, so callers get errors they never anticipated2023-08-18
- Exceptions make it easy to ignore errors or catch the wrong ones2021-05-20
- Users see cryptic exception messages and must search online to understand them2020-09-19
- APIs throw unexpected undocumented exceptions, causing hard-to-reproduce crashes and hours of debugging2020-02-03
- Hard to see from program text where errors may bubble up2018-08-28