why do error messages go like “install failure error 0001” instead of telling the user what’s wrong
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Others have explained why this happens, but I still think its a pretty terrible error message. Reasons:
1) It doesn’t identify the failing module. Often times when working on a complex software stack I’ve had real trouble just figuring out where the error came from.
2) I work a often with elderly people. They see a message like this and they assume they’ve done something wrong and are very frustrated that they cannot figure out what to do next. The message should say something to indicate that this is *not* an error caused by the user, and suggest that either the user try again another time, or call reach out to customer support, **and give contact info**.
From my cyber security class sometimes error messages are made to be hard to understand to prevent malicious intent. You wouldn’t want an ATM displaying an error that the door to reload/unload cash is unlocked.
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.
Someone in your class in school keeps stealing books, but nobody can figure out who.
Your teacher can’t watch everyone at once, especially since everyone isn’t doing the exact same thing at one moment.
Your teacher sets a rule in where you have to put a stamp in your planner whenever you enter the library, you also get a reward **if** you catch someone not returning their book or stamping.
At the end of the day, the teacher checks everyone’s planners and is able to narrow down, who has read a book, and from there who may not have returned their book.
The teacher can do with this information many things one of these is prevent anyone on a particular day from going to the library if a book was lost the prior day and they had a stamp and seeing if anything changes.
Same with a programmer, error codes like that usually have some defined meaning the system architect understands inherently or by reading the documentation; and they thus know where to look in millions of lines of code; to find what needs to be changed.
If the error occurs in multiple places, they can isolate the issue by testing those areas independent of one another or within the same environment while substituting a method/function as a pass-through(it doesn’t actually do anything or it gives a hard-coded response).
Usually errors that are displayed like this are catch alls or pre-defined catch’s, meaning something went wrong somewhere here, but we aren’t particularly sure either what caused it or even rarer what the error is otherwise it would be fixed prior – and potentially have a plain english definition like “Incorrect Password”.
Software Developers are barely given enough time to build the features they are asked for. Often time there’s not enough time or money for proper error handling and human friendly error messages. It’s even harder to justify when they should be the exception, not the norm. Time usually isn’t spent on extreme edge cases until it becomes a problem.
There’s a bunch of possible reasons, but at my work we deliberately have opaque error messages for anything that is publicly available – to make the system harder to reverse engineer / make it harder for anybody with bad intentions to understand what’s happening when they make a failed request.
Our internal systems tend to have much more useful error messages because they’re only ever seen by other staff members.
It’s also entirely possible that a weird error message is just because it’s a bug that nobody thought of, so there’s no error handling for it.
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