Bugs vs. Errors

"Debugging" a program is the process of going through your code to find where it is not behaving as expected. Debugging is a manual process performed by the developer. Sometimes developers use special software called a "debugger" to help them find bugs, but often they just use print statements to figure out what's going on.

Examples of debugging:

• Adding a missing parameter to a function call
• Updating a broken URL that an HTTP call was trying to reach
• Fixing a date-picker component in an app that wasn't displaying properly

"Error handling" is code that can handle expected edge cases in your program. Error handling is an automated process that we design into our production code to protect it from things like weak internet connections, bad user input, or bugs in other people's code that we have to interface with.

Examples of error handling:

• Checking error values and returning early or logging them
• Checking if pointers are not nil

If your code has a bug, errors won't help you. You need to just go find the bug and fix it.

If something out of your control can produce issues in your code, you should use error-handling logic to deal with it.

For example, there could be a prompt in Jello for users to update their role, but we don't want them to use punctuation. Validating their input and displaying an error message if something is wrong with it would be a form of "error handling".