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The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition
book

The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition

by David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
September 2019
Intermediate to advanced
352 pages
8h 3m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition
Topic 25
Assertive Programming

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

It seems that there's a mantra that every programmer must memorize early in his or her career. It is a fundamental tenet of computing, a core belief that we learn to apply to requirements, designs, code, comments, just about everything we do. It goes

This can never happen…

“This application will never be used abroad, so why internationalize it?” “count can't be negative.” “Logging can't fail.”

Let's not practice this kind of self-deception, particularly when coding.

Tip 39Use Assertions to Prevent the Impossible

Whenever you find yourself thinking “but of course that ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780135956977