why do error messages go like “install failure error 0001” instead of telling the user what’s wrong

Question

why do error messages go like “install failure error 0001” instead of telling the user what’s wrong

In: 1812

Answer 1

Many times it’s because the “thing that noticed the failure” is many, many, *many* steps away from the “thing that you tried to do”, and it’s probably used by a thousand different things.

That’s improve-able too, but you have to do it a thousand times, everywhere you try to do something. Per type of failure. Doing that manually is exhausting and difficult and prone to gaps and mistakes when you make changes in the future, and doing it mechanically doesn’t guarantee reasonable output.

So it’s often both difficult and simply not worth it. They could spend years of effort to improve the messages that people likely only see once or twice ever… or spend years of effort doing things that people care about more.