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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

Wait wait wait.

Not so fast.

i'm one of those programmers who read manuals and stack traces but I have to admit that I've seen my share of both manuals as well as stack traces that didn't make much sense.

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This is my experience with Clojure stack traces ~60-75% of the time. Perhaps it is a symptom of functional programming? A lot of function passing and anonymous functions make it difficult to generate a meaningful stack trace.

Clojure's stack traces are an issue with Clojure specifically, and how it's hosted on top of the JVM. A lot of the stack trace you get is actually implementation details of the Java objects making up the Clojure runtime. In effect, the program that you get stack traces of is the Clojure interpreter rather than your Clojure program which is running inside that interpreter.

Fortunately, I think 1.10 is going a long way towards fixing this.

I've heard similar things about Scala, though I haven't had a chance to confirm this for myself yet. Not 100% sure if this supports your hypothesis or not given that Scala is multiparadigm?

Why do they do this, though? Shouldn't they have realized from the start that such messages are not helpful, and should have given messages related to your Clojure program? (Or is there some difficult technical issue related to achieving this?)

Asking because reading about this issue in the past is one thing that has kept me from trying out Clojure.

Functional programming not so much- languages like Elixir or JS used functionally don't have this problem generally.

Elixir has had difficult to parse error messages until relatively recently, but this has improved immensely (Dialyzer/Dialyxir in particular).

In what way? I've been using Elixir since late 2015 and have rarely had issues.

My experience in Racket has been the opposite. Especially with the aid of DrRacket's stepping debugger, reading stack traces and finding bugs is rather painless. (Figuring out the best way to fix bugs, however, is no easier than in any other language.)

Yeah I agree. The way this thread is going you would think that all errors are easy and all you have to do is what the computer tells you and you’re done. I wish I’d known it was all that simple!

> stack traces that didn't make much sense.

Those can be especially prevalent in systems that utilize a lot of indirection.

Especially when you end up in C++ template hell.

Error in boost/bind.hpp:768

That kind of stuff permanently damaged my ability to enjoy using C++.

That's exactly what I felt as I was spending time on MSDN/Microsoft support website, reading about weird errors messages on Windows 95/98/NT/XP in 1990s. Some generic desc about the Windows error messages and no resolution.

as in tensorflow stack traces

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