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this feels like one of those things that needs to be tackled from both ends

teach people to read error messages and simultaneously improve the readability (and utility) or error messages

i don't know why we put up with such bad error messages anymore. i imagine it's a function of stockholm syndrome and the difficulty in getting messages changed

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I sort of blame exceptions here. They make it really easy to just let the error bubble up to the top. But often times the place where the error gets thrown doesn't have all the necessary context to have a really good error message. If you want a good readable error message you have to trap the exception at the appropriate place and then wrap it with the appropriate amount of context in the message. But the easy path is to pretend there is no error and let the very top layer surface anything that went wrong to the user.

Exceptions are appropriate if you create unique application errors or kill your app with it.

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