"False exceptions?" (was Re: theme of the week: tools

[Dan Perl]

"John J. Lee" <jjl at pobox.com> wrote in message 
news:87mzzakuqr.fsf at pobox.com...
> "Dan Perl" <danperl at rogers.com> writes:
>> My "nagging" on the false positives is mostly on the spin that Wingware 
>> puts
>> in their explanations.  It's one thing to explain it the way that Stephan
>> did, that it was better to offer something imperfect if that was also
>> providing some important advantages and then also offer the other
>> alternative ("We weighed having a necessarily imperfect but useful 
>> feature
>> with not having the feature at all.").  And it's another thing to insist
>> that this is not a problem and it is actually good for you.  This doesn't
>> seem to bother other people as much as it bothered me, but I do have a 
>> beef
>> with it.
>
> Dan, I suspect that (though perhaps their marketing may have room for
> improvement here ;-) there may have been an unstated assumption on the
> part of the Wing IDE people that, "obviously", the false-positives
> issue is only a "nit" if one has a hard debugging problem on one's
> hands, and that "obviously", one turns this feature off under all
> other circumstances.  Not necessarily obvious at all, of course.
>
> Perhaps, like many of the rest of us, they only wheel out their
> debugger when they hit a really *nasty* problem, so the exception
> issue simply never arises as anything other than a minor wart in what
> I can see could be a very handy feature.  That would explain why this
> feature is on by default.  Another explanation is that it's turned on
> by default just to advertise the feature -- if you don't bump into it
> like this, you might never realise it existed.

If Stephan is still reading this thread he may contradict this, but my 
suspicion is that your last explanation is the real one.  Such an approach 
can also backfire like it did in my case.

> John