It seems like the author thought stack traces are underrated because people don’t like exceptions and don’t always throw. It seems like they don’t understand why people don’t like exceptions, and think that stack traces should be there for every case where the author thinks should be an exception, and ties the desire to avoid exceptions to some strawman use case — a nice looking output — and called it “modern error handling”.

Error / exception handling is separate from stack traces. You don’t need to have an exception to have a stack trace, and stack traces aren’t just used for exceptions.

They also seem to not understand why people make do without stack traces in a microservice architecture. That’s simply not true. First off, you can still get stack traces of individual services. And secondly, if you build your services to accept, eg, something like a tracing ID, and print it along your logs, you essentially have a stack traces across services. In a web service, you can track the work done by all your systems for a single request from the client.

Now, onto why exceptions are somewhat disliked. Let’s just get the simple stuff out of the way: they’re generally bad for performance; they’re invisible to the method caller until they run into the problem, meaning you can’t ever ship updates that you’re confident won’t fall over disgracefully; try-catch hell, etc.

For a slightly more philosophical answer, why aren’t your exceptions just cases you need to handle? The try-catch pattern essentially builds up a separate channel of logic where your program needs to operate in but is expressed or recorded in very fragmented ways, forcing devs to have to pop open every function to look at why something is thrown, and hope that somewhere down the stack, no new exceptions are being thrown and not handled. The logic behind exceptions becomes second-class citizens that programmers can easily forget, instead of being front and centre. Can’t divide by 0? Tell me instead of setting me on a separate handling path. Why should I try-catch every single method call, or even property access? Don’t wait for the user to hit the call and just tell me that something is supposed to be impossible, or if I should handle the case where it doesn’t hold any values, right as I compile (dynamic languages can’t really do that).

I feel like you’re building the argument in a way that’s convenient for yourself there.

A non-hostile work environment doesn’t mean you won’t get reprimanded, especially when you go out of your way to sabotage somebody. Someone has to step in to stop the madness, and if all they do is to say stop (which I heard Linus did earlier), that’s not actually going to stop the conflict because nobody understands or acknowledges where the root of the conflict comes from.

And Linus is not even hostile here imo. There’s a lot of “you” language, but none of it was personal, and he’s not doing his old thing where he tells others to go end themselves. He seemed analytical and dissected the root of the issue so that people understand where things are actually coming from.

And no, I am by no means asking people to make that choice. I am simply suggesting that if all you do is surround yourselves with people who will never get mad at you for doing the wrong things, and that you will never accept anyone reprimanding you, then you’ve made a bad choice in life.

And yeah, “thin skinned” is subjective, and I’m not saying that it’s wrong to be thin-skinned. Some people have less capacity to take criticisms for various reasons, and that’s fine. If your colleagues don’t know how to mince their words (and let’s assume the intentions are good here), and you don’t have the right mental capacity to slice through those words yourself, then you can’t work effectively together. If the people you have to work closely with are all such clumsy people (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just unrefined), then there’s a problem, and it’s probably best that you don’t work with them or there at all, cause it’d only lead to chaos. If this is where you think I’m asking people to make the choice between livelihood and mental well-being, first off, I think this is an exaggeration because there’s almost always someplace else you can work at, and if you can’t, then there’s a bigger problem, and two, well, I think you’re idealizing the workplace a little too much. Sure, in an ideal world where people can immediately assume a professional and cordial personality at work, then you shouldn’t have to make the choice between livelihood and mental well-being. But people are imperfect. There are hostile work environments. There are non-hostile work environments with some hostile people. You can enforce policies that dictate how people should conduct themselves, but you can’t stop it from happening, and you can’t stop them fast enough.

So people do have to make that choice, even if they don’t want to, and even if we think it shouldn’t be a choice and that people should just have both.

Really? I feel the opposite. I thought Linus was very clear in calling out this maintainer’s bs, and I’d think it’s fair if I’m in the receiving end. I did something unprofessional: essentially tried sabotaging others while hiding behind a lie, that I “don’t care” about something while actually hating it.

Getting called out is not the end of a work relationship. We’re all flawed, and we might not notice our own problems and think we’re doing fine, and such callouts are good for our own development, both as a person and professionally.

But if you’re thin-skinned and think you’re better than others and so you won’t take criticisms from others, welp, can’t help ya there. I’d suggest therapy though.

This was pointed out in another comment but I will basically echo it to just give that call a boost: Point your instructor to well-regarded sources for introversion and extroversion, and let them know that the labelling in their note is not only inaccurate, it falsely attaches a wrongly defined word onto problematic behaviours that have nothing to do with what introversion and extroversion is, which is not good because it propagates a false narrative.

If your instructor doesn’t seem cooperative and insists on being correct, talk to other instructors that you trust, or even go to those with more authority to tell them about the issue. If you can’t get anyone to actually do something, I suggest you change schools immediately, and call the school out for what they did.

Maybe it’s just one of those days, but I have no tolerance for this sort of false narrative being spread, even if the original intention is innocuous, and especially in a school. Being forced to act in a certain way that deviates from one’s personality to not be perceived as a problematic person, especially over a badly-informed opinion, can have lasting negative consequences to children and adolescents. I’m tired of seeing introverted friends and family members suffer over the fact that they’re introverts, to the point where they will deny being an introvert and even echo these sorts of statements in order to blend in.