The 'defensive' nature refers to the mindset of the programmer (like when guilty people are defensive when being asked a simple question), that he isn't sure of anything in the code at any point, so he needs to constantly check every invariant.
Enterprise code is full of it, and it can quickly lead to the program becoming like 50% error handling by volume, many of the errors being impossible to trigger because the app logic is validating a condition already checked in the validation layer.
Its presence usually betrays a lack of understanding of the code structure, or even worse, a faulty or often bypassed validation layer, which makes error checking in multiple places actually necessary.
One example is validating every parameter in every call layer, as if the act of passing things around has the ability to degrade information.
A function must check its arguments. It cannot assume that the arguments are already checked (against its own requirements). This is regardless of what called it, or where the values came from.
The kind of defensive programming you're talking about has almost nothing to do with the contents of this article. This article is mostly just about structuring code so that bugs appear at compile time rather than runtime.
The 'defensive' nature refers to the mindset of the programmer (like when guilty people are defensive when being asked a simple question), that he isn't sure of anything in the code at any point, so he needs to constantly check every invariant.
Enterprise code is full of it, and it can quickly lead to the program becoming like 50% error handling by volume, many of the errors being impossible to trigger because the app logic is validating a condition already checked in the validation layer.
Its presence usually betrays a lack of understanding of the code structure, or even worse, a faulty or often bypassed validation layer, which makes error checking in multiple places actually necessary.
One example is validating every parameter in every call layer, as if the act of passing things around has the ability to degrade information.