Die Konferenz code.talks richtet sich an Entwickler:innen, die sich über aktuelle Trends, Technologien und Entwicklungen in der IT austauschen möchten. Gegründet 2011, hat sich das Event in den letzten Jahren zu einer der größten deutschsprachigen Plattformen für Webentwicklung, KI, DevOps & Co. entwickelt.
Unser Kollege Dr. Florian Wilhelm ist am 5. November mit seinem Talk „Exceptions: The New Spaghetti Code? – Rethinking Error Handling for Modern Software“ dabei.
Abstract:
Exceptions are a cornerstone of modern programming — but are they truly better than the „bad old days“ of goto? This talk offers a critical look at exceptions, showing how they can unintentionally reintroduce hidden, tangled control flows reminiscent of early programming pitfalls.
We’ll explore the history of error handling, from the chaos of goto to the rise of structured programming, and how exceptions were meant to solve these issues — but sometimes fall short. You’ll learn about the hidden costs of exception-heavy codebases, including maintainability, debugging complexity, and performance problems.
The session then shifts to practical alternatives: how Result types — common in languages like Rust, Haskell, and kind of in Go — provide a cleaner, more explicit way to model errors. We’ll also dive into how you can bring these ideas into your Python projects using libraries like returns.