

Error Messages Are Evil - cratermoon
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/error_messages_are_e.html

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kstenerud
"The "user"? Stop calling me that: I'm a person, a living breathing person,
with feelings."

\- Oh please.

"Well, that ay be good for machines, but what about what is good for people?
People are bad at precision and accuracy."

\- Which is why the computer has to be very conservative, and not go off
trying to decipher what the user meant, and doing things the user probably
didn't intend. There's then the issue of how sensitive the operation is. It's
ok for a google search to autocorrect your search. It's probably not a good
idea to use corrective heuristics in a nuclear missile silo.

"A truly collaborative system would tell me the requirements before I did the
work."

\- Yes, and soon enough you'll have to digest tomes of information (which
nobody will read) before you can even use the system.

"the machine was designed wrong, demanding that we conform to its peculiar
requirements."

The machine was designed with certain assumptions in place and compromises
made so that it could actually be shipped out the door. It is made up of
software that was designed under similar principles. That software, in turn,
was made up of other software components, etc. What you're asking for is a
ground-up redesign of "the perfect system", for which (1) there's no such
thing, (2) there never can be such a thing, and (3) were such a thing even
possible, it would be ridiculously expensive and would never ship because it
would never be ready.

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droope
I do not wish to be disrespectful to the author, but he fails to comprehend
that it is not possible to eliminate error messages.

There are rules that one needs to follow in order for things to work, and that
is not because the developer is evil, it is because of inherent limitations.

In this particular example, the error message seems stellar, and properly
explained. Personally I would be grateful of not receiving a message that says
"ERR_CANT_WRITE_DISK".

