Comment by haberman
11 years ago
> In my opinion, if you cannot write a left-pad, is-positive-integer, or isArray function in 5 minutes flat (including the time you spend Googling), then you don’t actually know how to code.
Spoken like someone who writes functions in 5 minutes that I find bugs in later.
Just because a problem is simple to describe informally doesn't mean it is simple to implement without bugs.
It would be trivial if the language lent itself to trivial solutions and there wasn't a culture of trying to anticipate and catch really messed up error cases that results largely from user errors.
In Python I would write ´if num > 0´, if it matters that it is an integer I would cast it to int, and that handles everything you should be handling at that level. If your user passes in a list instead of a number type, the code should crash because then there's probably an input error somewhere. If a user has monkeypatched a base class to make a number into something else the code should also fail and you deserve whatever happens to you.
Catching every possible error is a mistake.