Eli5 When applications crash, why do they provide an obscure error code instead of a small description of what the issue actually is?
In: Technology
If a program crashes – its a bug.
Bugs are unanticipated behaviour – if the developer realised what the problem was during development they would have designed that issue to not fail or fail gracefully.
Therefore there is rarely any end user useful information that can be conveyed in a bug message. If the program crashed because the file type you tried to read in was wrong – well unless the developer wrote the code to check that, they aren’t going to be able to give you a helpful error message. If they did write the code to check the file type – then they probably would have prevented the crash in the first place!
A lot of errors are really buried in the details of the code and unless you have intimate knowledge of the software they won’t help. If you got an error message:
IndexError: list index out of range
What do you do with that information?
Also a lot of software is compiled, so the actual machine code ran by your computer is difficult to directly link to the source code. The error message will at least be some sort of reference to tell the developer what function failed.
Finally the developer may not want to post full stack traces of errors, since that may reveal too much about the inner workings of the software.
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