How to Make Error Handling Less Error-Prone

Explore error handling challenges and innovative solutions in this 48-minute conference talk from Strange Loop. Delve into the complexities of error handling in computer science and practical programming, examining how incorrect approaches can lead to security vulnerabilities, data loss, and user frustration. Analyze existing error handling styles, including return and status code checking, conditions and restarts, and exceptions, to understand why programs often fail to recover correctly from errors. Discover the fundamental conflict between encapsulation and having sufficient information for consistent state recovery. Learn about a novel approach that provides language support for automatic state recovery before failed calls, preventing inconsistencies. Gain insights into the 'Ken' protocol and its role in extending automatic recovery to asynchronous and distributed systems. Presented by Daira Hopwood, a transgender expert in programming language research and security, who brings 20 years of experience to this comprehensive exploration of making error handling less error-prone.

"How to make error handling less error-prone" by Daira Hopwood