{"id":132,"date":"2008-09-18T18:49:11","date_gmt":"2008-09-18T23:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/18\/i-would-rather-have-a-runtime-error-than-a-compile-error\/"},"modified":"2008-09-18T18:49:13","modified_gmt":"2008-09-18T23:49:13","slug":"i-would-rather-have-a-runtime-error-than-a-compile-error","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/18\/i-would-rather-have-a-runtime-error-than-a-compile-error\/","title":{"rendered":"I Would Rather Have a Runtime Error Than a Compile Error"},"content":{"rendered":"

And the weird thing is, I realized early in my career that I would actually rather have a runtime error than a compile error. [(some laughs<\/em>)] Because at that time… now this is way contrary to popular opinion. Everybody wants early error detection. Oh God, not a runtime error, right? But the debugger gives you this ability to start poking and prodding, especially in a more dynamic language, where you can start simulating things, you can back it up… You’ve got your time-machine debuggers like the OCaml one, that can actually save the states and back up.<\/p>\n

You’ve got amazing tools at your disposal (in the debugger)… Whereas if the compiler gives you an error that says “expected expression angle-bracket”, you don’t have a “compiler-debugger” that you can shell into…<\/p>\n

So, you know, in some sense, your runtime errors are actually kind of nicer.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

— An excerpt from one of Steve Yegge’s (long!) talks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I think there is a real nugget of truth in this. At runtime, you can examine your program’s state<\/em>, but there is absolutely no way to do that at compile time. Without a debugger, you can’t just look at some nontrivial code and know<\/em> what the value of x<\/code> is when there’s an error reading y<\/code>. (Adding \"print x\"<\/code>, recompiling, and trying again, would work of course, but that’s just using your compiler as an inefficient debugger!)<\/p>\n

Similarly, Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing<\/a> <\/em>, essentially argues that some tests can only be made at runtime. (If you read any links on this page, read it<\/a>, it’s much shorter and to the point).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And the weird thing is, I realized early in my career that I would actually rather have a runtime error than a compile error. [(some laughs)] Because at that time… now this is way contrary to popular opinion. Everybody wants early error detection. Oh God, not a runtime error, right? But the debugger gives you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,24,93],"tags":[77,178,169,179],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-quotes","category-reverse-engineering","tag-debugging","tag-dynamic-typing","tag-software-development","tag-static-typing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}