> I would argue, a very bad habit in any language where the error could possibly be other than what you expect
Assuming that ModOrEpoch was being used to populate a mouseover somewhere on a ui that literally could not be less important, any error propagation is going to be degrading service considerably more than swallowing any error and returning epoch time.
Unless there is (and there could well be) a subset of errors which actually cause serious concerns but don't cause errors in any other function in the application? Do you have any examples/thoughts of what that might entail. :)
I think I might not be getting my point across here.
I'm not saying you should propagate the error all the way up to the end-user in a UI.
I'm saying that you very, very rarely would be so uninterested in a lower-level error that you wouldn't even want to log it, except for a set of expected errors.
So when we imagine a "subset of errors which actually cause serious concerns," we should be realistic about what "serious" means -- but I say that for the "subset" that is all unexpected errors, the minimum level of "serious" is that you want to know it happened. In my contrived example code, imagine the web server process doesn't have permission to stat the given file. You'd want to knwo about that, right?
If you're not doing the mouseover properly N% of the time, you have a more-or-less serious problem with your UI, and you presumably want to know that's happening and why. Maybe what you do about it is expand your set of known errors. But at least you have the option of doing something about it.
Assuming that ModOrEpoch was being used to populate a mouseover somewhere on a ui that literally could not be less important, any error propagation is going to be degrading service considerably more than swallowing any error and returning epoch time.
Unless there is (and there could well be) a subset of errors which actually cause serious concerns but don't cause errors in any other function in the application? Do you have any examples/thoughts of what that might entail. :)