On 2019-01-29 13:44, Nick Coghlan wrote:
On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 14:47, Stephen J. Turnbull
<turnbull.stephen...@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
I don't disagree. I disagree with the conclusion that it's worth the
effort to try to improve all error messages that confuse new users,
because new users (by definition) don't know enough to respond
usefully in many cases. In those cases, they need to be told what's
going on and why, where more experienced users can figure it out from
their background knowledge of Python semantics. Embedding a "theory
of operations" note in every error message would be possible, but I
don't think it's a good idea -- it would certainly make the language
more annoying for experienced developers.
FWIW, we have pretty decent evidence that error messages don't have to
provide a wonderful explanation on their own in order to be helpful:
they just need to be distinctive enough that a web search will
reliably get you to a page that gives you relevant information.
Pre-seeded answers on Stack Overflow are excellent for handling the
second half of that approach (see [1] for a specific example).
Cheers,
Nick.
[1]
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25445439/what-does-syntaxerror-missing-parentheses-in-call-to-print-mean-in-python
I have a vague recollection that a certain computer system (Amiga?) had
a 'why' command. If it reported an error, you could type "why" and it
would give you more details.
I suspect that all that was happening was that when the error occurred
it would store the additional details somewhere that the 'why' command
would simply retrieve.
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