API usage rant

If you have been following me recently (Facebook, Linked-in, Tweeter, etc) you probably are aware that I have been busy taking care of the building of my new house, my job and what not (not necessarily in this order ;).

Man, building a new place proved to be a huge time sink; since we've finally finished the main construction phase I expect to blog more often.

Ok, so lets start with a rant (I am really good ranting :))

Some time ago I was playing with one of my toy projects when I got an exception while adding a new entry into a dictionary. The exception was quite self explanatory about what had happened (from the point of view of the dictionary class implementer): a duplicate key was added (which,  according to the documentation, is explicitly prohibited).

Ok, I can live with that, it was my fault after all ;) My real issue is that the message would be much more helpful had it included the actual key value (of course you override ToString() method in all of your public classes, don't you ?).
Without this information I was forced to debug the code (of course I could catch the exception and print the key but then I'd be required to change my code just to find out what was happening) to figure out what the original exception could have told me.

To my understanding, one of the reasons for this is to avoid possible sensible information from leaking and, even though IMHO this is reasonable, it makes me think whether we could do it better. 

To me looks like the dictionary class developer (product owner, or whoever) was faced with the usual coast/benefit decision: make it easier, more convenient to use or make it suitable for use when sensible information is involved and he/she decided for the later.

When writing libraries I usually tend to making it easier to be used at the coast of a higher chance of developers misuse (or using it in a way that may shut then in their foots). I confess that I had never thought about this particular scenario but now I think it could be fixed (made more flexible) by allowing the user (in this case the developer) to decide what to expose in exceptions (through an enum, an interface, you name it) and choosing a safe default value.

What do you think?

Adriano