Oh this is a big pet peeve of mine. (Error messages, that is)
Terrible, terrible. They are designed to tell humans about potential mistakes, but written in a language more suited for a computer. They are written in that passive-case, "engineering speak" that tried to sound efficient but really talks around what it is trying to say. "Syntax error could not find matching }" could easily have been "You have an open { without a } to match it - perhaps one is missing somewhere around line 20?" if written by a human with an understanding of written (human) language and, even more important, compassion and base-level empathy for other lesser, imperfect humans who might possibly make an error.
Anyway, I'll go back to lurking. Really want to try Quoth now!
Best,
Evan
On 25 Mar 2011, at 14:06, Kassen wrote:
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> On 25 March 2011 14:09, Craig Latta <craig_at_netjam.org> wrote:
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> Thanks, Kas! That's what I'm going for.
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> It seems to me that error messages are a odd thing; typically they appear aimed at expert users, while those are the least likely to encounter them, with novice users being both more likely to see them and more likely to benefit from good ones. Clearly good error messages are hard because it's way harder to predict in what ways things can go wrong than it is to predict proper behaviour, so perhaps we can't complain about the status quo too much.
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> It'll be interesting to see whether the current Quoth scheme will stay as clear and usable when the complexity increases. There may also be questions about who's error something is. When we "teach" something to a new Quoth object and we then get a error trying to use the new command in a way we feel is proper that might call for a different kind of error, perhaps a invitation to expand upon the definition instead of us re-phrasing the command?
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> Kas.
Received on Sun Mar 27 2011 - 17:38:02 BST