In PHP, if you forget the check, and have error reporting turned off (which you should), you'd never KNOW you forgot the check, because missing it is only a logic error, whereas an exception blowing up a python script will be caught by the runtime.
> have error reporting turned off (which you should)
No, you should not. You should never have error reporting turned off. You should certainly have it set to not display errors to the client, but all errors should be sent to a log, preferably syslog, and they should be reviewed. Your code shouldn't generate any errors.
The settings related to displayed errors in the page are error_reporting and display_errors. The error logging is a totally sperate group of keys starting with log_
Yes, I know. Like I said, error_reporting on (set to E_STRICT) and display_errors off. And yes, where the error goes is a completely different question.
In production, you should have error_reporting set to something like: E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED
And then:
display_errors = Off
display_startup_errors = Off
track_errors = Off
html_errors = Off
ignore_repeated_errors = Off
ignore_repeated_source = Off
log_errors = On
error_log = /path/to/log/file (or syslog)
