Don't Swallow Exceptions - Ever!

Among lots and lots of good reason not to swallow exceptions, I just ran into a doozy. I'm rewriting a VB.Net application in Java. It has some really complex calculations. One of the calculations involves using a 2D array to setup some default values. The array is in a try catch block. With a catch(Exception e) and nothing else. No logging. Nothing.

Two days of trying to figure out why my calculations are slightly off what's expected. Thank you FitNesse, by the way. Anyway, come to realize that I'm swallowing an IndexOutOfBoundsException. See, VB.Net starts arrays at 1 while Java starts arrays at 0, so my array initialization was barfing and returning a bad value.

I did what most of us do now and then. I saw the empty catch block and thought, "I'll get back to that. I just want to get these calculations right. Then I'll fix those exceptions." Woops.

Handle exceptions as soon as you write the catch block. Handle it as best you can. At the very least print it to standard error, so when it happens you know it happened. Had I done at least that, I wouldn't be two more days behind.