= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Vladimir_M comments on Learned Blankness - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (186)
Sometimes my critical contribution to helping another programmer solve a problem basically consists of reading the fascinating error message. (Well, the fact that I also programmed the library they are using to show the error message is arguably a critical contribution as well.)
If you can figure out the problem from a syntax error message with C++ templates, your contribution is certainly far from trivial!
I'm sure that is true, but the error messages I am talking about are ones I designed to contain all the information needed to fix the problem.
Writing seriously verbose exception text for every single exception thrown may be annoying and space-taking, but after all the crazy things I've seen, I wouldn't do without it. Include what you were expecting, what you encountered, and where you are.
It's funny you say that, I once figured out a problem for someone by diagnosing an error message with C++ templates. Wizardry! However, the "base" of the error message looked roughly like
Cryptic, right? It turns out he needed to specify a return value policy in order to wrap a function returning Foo. All I did for him was scan past junk visually looking for anything readable or the word "error".
That's the general algorithm of reading STL error messages. I still can't get why people look at you as if you were a wizard, if all that you need to do is to quickly filter out irrelevant 90% of the message. Simple pattern matching exercise.