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Discussion on: What is the benefit of Functional Programming?

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

I'm saying that exceptions in general don't prevent something from being a pure function. I don't belive it makes a significant difference whether the error handling is explicit or implicit -- it can be considered part of the contract either way.

For example, in my language Leaf, errors are an implicit part of the signature, they can however be turned off.

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kspeakman profile image
Kasey Speakman

We will have to agree to disagree then. I think any error handling strategy could work in its own set of conditions. But to say that exceptions are the best way to handle errors across the board, I can't agree with.

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seykron profile image
seykron

In web environments you usually have one or two options to manage errors: retrying IO or returning an HTTP status code 500. There's a user in the other side waiting for a reply, and in the most common request handling model thread-per-request there's a thread bound to the current request waiting to be released. So you can either choose to handle the error flow like a special flow in your business logic (like Try's in scala), or you just can throw an exception, set up a catch-all handler and return a friendly error code so the user can retry the operation.

I really don't support error flows in web environments, it usually opens additional branches in the execution that makes harder to debug and detect errors. The easiest way I know to debug and fix errors is to throw exceptions closer to the place the error occurs.