JGWeissman comments on Learned Blankness - Less Wrong
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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.