PHP Rant: Evils of hiding errors

I hate it to the core the fact that php has an @ operator. It is evil. Today's applications written in php are monstrous. If you have used the @ symbol at any point in time, you effectively may have introduced a fatal error without knowing it.

Some functions in both php and its extensions might be throwing a notice or deprecation errors which are not to be ignored. Because in the future you might want to upgrade php versions in order to take care of a critical bug. Your code should not break if this happens. If it does on a large application, the consequences are disastrous. Without the errors active, you are effectively hiding the your first indicators of where the problems are.

We should not let the management make us publish unstable code like that. It hurts the stakeholders of the application you are working on very much adversely in the future. It could be a very critical time when you had to fix this bug, but end up not knowing where the bug exists, which takes down the application which might be a big money maker for the company.

In conclusion. @ symbol should be banned right away. We should have a php setting available to turn off the effects of that symbol.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Long time no post

Hello, howdy and salutations. I've not blogged in a very long time.  I wanted to get back into the habit.  I have grown tremendously in the past few years.  My daughter is now 3.  The last post I had was her birth.  Now she is one of the smartest kids I know.  She asks questions that most adults are afraid to ask, which makes me both afraid and proud of her. I've also gone through a great journey at Nextopia Software Corporation.  I've been through the creation of biggest platforms in the company's history (we called it the Watson Engine).  I have worked tremendously from old day of Monolith physical boxes to virtual boxes, to containers and even serverless. I have been part of building out the team at Nextopia over the 4 year journey and have met some amazing devs whom I have been proud to work with. Like every family though sometimes the careers of people lead them down different path.  This is what ultimately happened at Nextopia as well.  Senior devel
Read more

Decade 2020 - the begining.

Hi all, It's been a while since I wrote any articles.  Since my last article, the world has changed.  2 of the biggest changes in the world has taken place. We are witnessing one the cusping events of our generation.  Covid-19 from the start of the year has given us a common enemy.  Unfortunately for many, it has proven to be one of the biggest killers in the world since World War 2.  Real question is, is my that statement truly the truth?  Did we tally how many deaths we have had last year.  What were the combined number of that?   I used to read in the history books of the Indian Caste system.  The slave trades of old.  Empires of old.  Real question I have is, is it any different now?  I am not a politician, a historian, a protester, a captain of industry, a health care worker, an elder, a black person, or a white person, so I don't know.  There are people who are far more qualified than I am who can answering many of these questions of today. Here is what I see in this worl
Read more

New Decade: What clients want - the quest for Beauty, Functionality or User Experience

Happy new year everyone, welcome to the new decade. My career now sits at over a decade and a half old.  I have done freelance and quite a bit of work for companies as full time developer.  I have learned from some of the greats and had the privilege of working with some of them too. I am still stumped by one of my greatest mysteries in my career.  It's basically what the customer really want.  I have found that to be the single biggest reasons for failure of a project.  Failure to understand what the customer really want and to get them to agree to a single set of requirement. Let me preface the paragraph above.  It's not really their fault that they don't understand what they want.  Software that does essentially the same thing works very differently in terms of user interface and user experience.  Most common example of this is how gmail worked vs good old fashioned outlook.  Essentially the same idea as far as email sending and receiving goes, but now you didn'
Read more