Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
Basically, university vs self-taught is not the issue, but individual abilities are. Having a university degree is no guarantee that the person knows anything at all about programming in the real world.
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In that case, the degrees and the universities awarding them are useless. Yes, I knew a lot of coding and best practices before I began studying, but I did learn a lot of things that I would never have learned on my own, except when doing it wrong and finding out about it the hard way.
On exceptions: I never understood those. I still don't. Try-Catch? WTF. So you just TRY if something works, and if it doesn't, you throw an error. That feels like trial and error. Maybe I'm old school, but I rarely use exceptions.
If there is one thing I try to adhere to, then it is that my code must never crash and always return either a usable result, or an error. Using an exception (with which your function exits unexpectedly) instead of an error code (with which your function terminates normally) is IMHO no better than a controlled crash.
edit: Funnily enough,
Joel Spolsky agrees with me, again. (This guy is a well-respected software developer; to such an extent in fact, that I consider myself to be either right if my opinion corresponds with his, and wrong if it doesn't.)