Traditional versus functional error handling comparison

Every developer experiences it sooner or later: running into an error while coding. But as the coding world has changed, so has the way we deal with these problems. Let’s look at the clear differences between the old and new ways of handling errors in C# and understand why this new approach is becoming more popular.

The traditional way

In traditional OOP, exceptions are the go-to mechanism:

• Throwing exceptions: We rely on system or custom exceptions when things go wrong:

  public User GetUser(int id)
  {
      if (id < 0)
          throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException(nameof(id));
      // ... fetch the user ...
  }

• Catching exceptions: Use try-catch blocks to handle and possibly recover from errors:

  try
  {
      var user = GetUser(-5);
  }
  catch (ArgumentOutOfRangeException ex)
  {
      Console.WriteLine...