When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.

Software should be transparent in the way that it fails, as well as in normal operation. It's best when software can cope with unexpected conditions by adapting to them, but the worst kinds of bugs are those in which the repair doesn't succeed and the problem quietly causes corruption that doesn't show up until much later.

Therefore, write your software to cope with incorrect inputs and its own execution errors as gracefully as possible. But when it cannot, make it fail in a way that makes diagnosis of the problem as easy as possible.

Words to live by.

[scribbling.net]