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Comment by callesgg | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know most of the times error messages on computers are garbage. People build up some type of fear for the error message format.

I have an example:

I built a logistics and invoicing tool a few years back with error messages that where human readable with clear proper messages that told the user exactly what they did wrong and it even proposed how they might fix the problem.

I don’t know how many times I had to go to the users workstations read the text out loud for them like they where a 5 year old and ask them what they thought it meant. They always knew what it meant but I had to read it for them it was embarrassing.

And these where university educated accountants that where using the software.

After a lifetime of garbage error messages like “error code 4513” people just zone out.

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For real. How difficult would it be to have the computer tell us what the error code means instead of a single sentence.

I get codes back in the day when storage for a whole book was costly, but that isn't the case anymore. Just tell us the error, show us the pointers, and then tell us what typical fixes are instead of expecting us to go to the internet for a solution.

My take is that cryptic error messages have always been a cross between 'protecting company secrets' and 'never really admit to a mistake'. Sure, MS or Apple could just throw up a dialog that said "Sorry, we trashed the file you were working on, here are the last 1024 chars" but people would actually be more angry then, instead of just "Error 1234 occurred" (or at least they'd have to go look it up to be mad).

As developers, we also have to be used to a lot of completely unhelpful errors. Yeah, couldn't connect to the DB, sure... oh, but actually because my code ate all of memory, why didn't you say that in the first place?

I suspect it grew out of electrical engineering. Machines/parts could only return errors as integers, so you would expect people to open up the documents and read that error code 1021 meant that the unit had caught fire.

Software just kept the tradition of error codes, since that meant you could also sell that juicy documentation (localized into whatever language you wanted) to the user as well. I suspect it also a localization issue because OracleDB would never return the table/column in the error message, so as to be easier to translate.

Why would a user-friendly system need error messages in the first place?

The modal dialog breaks UX spectacularly.

Even logs should have messages that actually are intuitive to follow.

From my mentioned example one reason was cause the user loaded a csv file with incompatible data.

Or cause the user had filled in part two of a task but not part one and then tried to continue with parts of the task that where dependent on filling in part one.

Or the user tried to synchronize orders from the erp system but the erp system would not return any orders.

Still there are better and worse ways to identify and present failure. A modal often being worse for instance.

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