Developers, please, fix those bugs!
As a developer I feel that I should be concerned about errors in any application that I work on. I know it’s tempting to ignore errors if possible as then you don’t need to fix them until someone else spots them. It is also true that the latest development tools and software make it easier to write error free code and therefore perhaps we can become complacent.
Some errors are unavoidable, it you spin up a page and get a 500 screen then you’d better fix it but some errors are more subtle. JavaScript often fits into the latter category. JavaScript can have errors that are not immediately noticeable in terms of the functioning of a page. For example, many ads or widgets use JavaScript that should it not work does not affect the page in a way that a user would not be able to use it (sometimes they may even not notice).
But here’s the thing, errors are bad, they are a sign of something bad, errors mean something is not working. Something needs fixing!
As a developer I want to catch these errors as much as possible and therefore I have my browser set to pop-up error messages rather than hide them as an icon in the corner. By being so disruptive I can not fail to notice when there are problems. Unfortunately this also means that any JS errors on any website I visit also pops-up a dialogue. This happens a lot, and I mean a lot. I’m not going to name and shame here but some major tech sites throw up half a dozen errors on every page at every visit and they never appear to get fixed. Any site that is littered with Ads is usually a primary offender.
We recently started working with Flex and part of the FlexBuilder install is the Flash plug-in for developers which throw ActionScript errors. This has been interesting because now as I surf the web I am getting AS error dialogues to compliment the JS ones.
Using the internet is frequently turned into an extremely irritating experience by the onslaught of error messages. Now, for most uses with the regular Flash plug-in and JS errors turned off this will not be an issue. However, what it does mean is that there is an enormous amount of code out there that is NOT working. Whatever it is supposed to be doing it isn’t and somebody somewhere should be worrying about that, shouldn’t they?
If not for the sake of your applications then for my surfing pleasure please developers turn on your error messages and fix those bugs.
I have a lot of respect for both Clive and Howard and what your team has accomplished. However, I will go one step farther than Clive and suggest that any developer who feels “it’s tempting to ignore errors if possible” is missing something foundational in their overall make-up. In work and life, I’ve always adhered to Rule #1 from “The Pragmatic Programmer: Care about Your Craft. Why spend your life developing software unless you care about doing it well?”