Is “Dying is Awesome” preferred?

Question

Recently I attended Jeffrey Richter\'s training courses about .NET. He mentions one strategy of coding \"Dying is awesome\". That is, don\'t write \"catch (Exception ex)\" e

Answer 1

Also known as Offensive Programming.

You should check out, "Offensive Programming: Crash Early, Crash Often".

Which is a very different ideology from the norm of Defensive Programming:

[Defensive Programming] is intended to ensure the continuing function of a piece of software in spite of unforeseeable usage of said software.

I personally like the "Crash Early, Crash Often" philosophy.

I've seen far too many:

try  
{  
    // ... Huge block of code goes here  
}  
catch(Exception ex)  
{  
   // Do nothing...  
}  

Which is far worse than crashing hard. If exceptions are handled properly then a little defensive programming is fine.