But coders, alas, must contend with completely insane error messages to this day. Say, if you heavily use C++ templates (you will) and you get a linker error (you will) in, God help you, Visual Studio.
Not that GCC is much better.
/usr/include/c++/4.6/bits/stl_algo.h:190:4: error: no match for ‘operator==’ in ‘__first.__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator::operator* [with _Iterator = std::vector*, _Container = std::vector >, __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator::reference = std::vector&]() == __val’
(I’m not responsible for this one, I got it from here but I assure you, I’ve seen much worse when, say, trying to get OpenCV with CUDA and contrib to build, esp. on windows)
That particular message deserved all the hate it received, and more.
So short, twee, and devoid of the vocabulary usually found in error messages that it virtually had to have been intentionally added by a human; rather than being an unfortunate corner case of a usually sensible concatenate-the-relevant-stuff error message mechanism; profoundly devoid of information(either provided directly or indirectly provided by being distinctive enough to search; like 0x8024400A); afflicted by a too-precious-by-half attitude(rather like a PR flack couching an event in the lowest-responsibility terms available; it doesn’t even acknowledge that ‘something’ is an error; mention what program ‘something’ happened to; or speculate on why).
And all about a process that, while complex, can be(and is internally) broken down into distinct parts that have verbose, if sometime cryptic, logs: the BITS transfer session to obtain the source files; formatting the target drive; probably some DISM stuff. Plenty of room for actually informative error messages; but nooo.
Let me tell you how much rage I feel these days at Windows’ huge shift toward casual language (giving it a very Steve Buscemi feel), and vague error messages.
HResult error codes may not be particularly friendly but damnit they are at least usually helpful (unless you just scatter E_FAIL or E_UNEXPECTEDs everywhere, in which case, you suck). Now it’s all, “oops”, and “something went wrong”.
