Graceful Exits

The primary goal of a pragmatic programmer is to create code which exits gracefully. Code might be successful in the task it undertakes; it might contain clever convolutions and obfuscations; it might be a horrible hack; it might even fail in every single one of its own objectives. But if the code can be gracious to its environment, and to the processes that must precede and succeed it, then that code can respectively be deployed, polished, refactored or fixed, while the programmer is confident that the code can be run and run, and only useful information can be obtained during the running of it.

This blog discusses graceful exits that I, as a programmer, have managed to bring about. Few if any posts will be anything more than what Wikipediatricians call “stubs”—partial discussions that provide no resolution or easy answers—but it is hoped that every post will eventually arrive at that most treasured terminus, at which the story can at least choose another direction in which to travel: the graceful exit.