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Agree that there's a big difference between the error happening at compile time vs. happening at run time in prod, but I personally find the python stacktrace much more descriptive of how we got to the error than a lot of other languages.

A certain amount of it is probably a familiarity thing, but I do usually find myself able to parse it to the point of what line in which file things started to go wrong.

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Other languages can do the same, they just deliberately make the decision not to because of performance. Ruby has the same nice stacktrace (even nicer).

There was some work that took ML compile time errors and created Python-like stacktraces of how this specific error could blow up at runtime in a Python-like fashion. Students found those concrete errors with concrete values easier to reason about than abstract compile time errors.

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