As a young lad, hacking about in Visual Basic, I never really appreciated how wildly dangerous the statement ON ERROR RESUME NEXT slapped at the top of each file really was.

Generally, in life and in coding, it’s considered bad form to mess up and then just plough on regardless. Visual Basic taught a generation of programmers the opposite: when faced with not knowing how to handle something, carrying on regardless was a valid choice. Not only valid, but a sensible default!

VBs odd choices came to mind recently, when considering the choices available to a developer when faced with a lack of information. Here, one is faced with two choices:

A) Guess
B) Stop

Like executing code and unhandled errors: It’s often better to just stop.