Movie: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

This post does not contain any spoilers, unless you would consider as a spoiler my opinion on how the quality if the movie varies as the movie progresses.  (Or the image below.)

Picture source: cgmeetup.com

So, I watched The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes yesterday, and what can I say, wow, it blew my mind. I started watching it having very low expectations, and I was very pleasantly surprised for about one hour and fifty minutes of its total two hour and ten minute duration, which includes the end titles. Then, starting with the "I am saving the human race" incident, it transformed into the crap that I had expected from the beginning, perhaps even worse, but that does not annul the fact that the first one hour and fifty minutes were one of the most pleasant movie watching experiences I have had in quite some time.

The transaction pattern and the feature badly missing from exceptions.

Exceptions are the best thing since sliced bread.  If you use them properly, you can write code of much higher quality than without them.  I think of the old days before exceptions, and I wonder how we managed to get anything done back then.  There is, however, one little very important thing missing from implementations of exceptions in all languages that I know of, and it has to do with transactions.

At a high level, exception handling looks structurally similar to transactional processing.  In both cases we have a block of guarded code, during the execution of which we acknowledge the possibility that things may go wrong, in which case we are given the opportunity to leave things exactly as we found them. So, given this similarity, it is no wonder that one can nicely facilitate the other, as this sample code shows: