First, do no harm: a curricular approach to reliability.

To promote reliability, the adoption of deferred error coding within computer science curricula is advocated. It is both a sound development strategy and aligned well pedagogically. By deferring specific error handling (first, doing no harm) the student better appreciates error handling's subtleties and its importance as an independent topic. The presentation will also include taxonomies of exceptions and exception handlers, and the relationships between them. Much of the discussion is language independent, but specific attention is given to the Java checked exception controversy.