By now, America’s STEM problem – the growing gap between demand and skill in American jobs in STEM fields – is well recognized (see this commentary by Bill Nye). One source of the problem is a lack of interest in the sciences and mathematics among young Americans that begins at an early age. Continue reading
The execution of a program can suddenly terminate for several reasons. To prevent unexpected program behaviors, developers can include error handling mechanisms in their programs. Specifically, in Java, developers can use two types of exceptions: checked and unchecked. Checked exceptions (IOException, DataFormatException, ParseException, SQLExceptions, etc.) are always caught on compile time, whereas unchecked exceptions (OutOfMemoryError, ArithmeticException, NullPointerException, IllegalArgumentException, IllegalStateException, etc.) can occur on runtime and lead a program to an unexpected termination (crash)—if there is no prevention mechanism in the source code to caught the exception. However, there is a debate regarding the use of the unchecked exceptions in the source code (see Unchecked Exceptions — The Controversy, in the Java documentation).