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Comment by easywood | Hacker News Reader

No comment would have been better than this comment. Now both the software and its defenders sound really hostile and off-putting.

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It's a database for programmers that want to be able to program their database and have a basic GUI on top.

If it's too big a hurdle to read the manual you'll never manage to use it for its purpose. Is this a threat to you somehow? In what way?

Do you have the same opinion about ripgrep?

  $ rg 'function('
  regex parse error:
      function(
            ^
  error: unclosed group

The error message from rg says exactly what is the problem though?

And that’s what people say BeeBase should do here too.

Something like:

Error: invalid name: must start with uppercase letter

Not some obtuse message that you have to go look up in a manual for no reason

No, it doesn't. You fill in with knowledge about regex, which isn't explicit in the error message.

The equivalent of BeeBase’s error in your example would be simply “invalid regex”, which I’d say is still more useful as regex is widely understood and there are many tools that you can give regex to that will tell you what is wrong with it.

No, there's a specificity to "name" and "group" that makes them similar, which is one part of why I settled on this example. The other is that I expected the recipient to have experience with regex and find the example dumb, confirming my position that one can very well demand a basic knowledge of the tool that isn't immediately communicated by it.

Like knowledge of the regex language, or having spent ten minutes skimming through the tutorial part of a PDF manual.

In my experience, how to use a manual is a technique more widely understood than regex. Maybe this impression is wrong, I'd welcome something tangible pointing in another direction if it is.

If it's any consolation, I (some random guy on the internet) would look for naming conventions in the manual if I was given the error "invalid name".

What's an "unclosed group"? And how would I go about finding that out without reading some sort of manual?

The difference is providing a short succinct message that is either familiar or can be looked up as rg does here, vs vaguely saying invalid name without saying why.

It worsens the UX for no reason.

As a sibling comment said, the program already knows why the name was invalid. It would have cost nothing to surface the reason when reporting the error.

I'm not arguing that I think "Invalid name" is a good message here. I don't think it is. But if you're relying on either familiarity or the ability to look it up, then you're still relying on there being a manual to provide that information in the first place if it is not somehow included in the error message itself. As would be the case here with Bee and rg.

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