Today a friend of mine checked in code that read: var stream = new fs.createReadStream(filename); The ‘new’ in the code was not intended. Our expansive auto tests passed without a glitch. In fact, the ‘stream’ variable was correctly set to the stream – exactly like if the ‘new’ keyword was not present. It turns out …

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I don’t get exceptions. There’s this theory that they should be raised for ‘exceptional’ cases. But in reality lots of API uses it as a way to just pass back the error code. Joel has already said whatever I want to say about exceptions over a decade ago, so I won’t repeat his article here. …

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