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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of using Win9x when programs crashed (as often happened then), prompting Windows to present those "This program has performed an illegal operation" dialogs.

As a kid the only bit of that message that made any sense was "illegal operation" which made me wonder if I'd broken some law somehow.

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The first computer at my home was a machine my father bought for bookkeeping for his business. I had a loose understanding of what that meant (around 8-9 y/o). I knew paying taxes was something he did.

I remember looking thru the BASIC manual and seeing “ILLEGAL...” error messages. I assumed it meant that doing whatever this was somehow violated tax laws. Made sense to me since the computer was used for bookkeeping.

This is why I don't put easter eggs or obscure programmer-lingo into programs anymore. Every error is potentially user-facing.

At the very least if it's something where I need to include a technical error message or stack trace, I like to include something like

"An unexpected error occurred! If this happens multiple times, here is some information you can email our support team:\n{technical output}"

Of course often the support team is just me.

…but every other developer making the same decision has made computers boring.

I remember seeing

> FATAL ERROR

and being like...uh...do I call the police?

You should call for an ambulance instead.

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